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JOHN ADAMS, 



THE 



Statesman of the American Revolution. 



ADDRESS 



BEFORE THE 



; WEBSTER HISTORICAL SOCIETY, 

At its Annual Meeting in Boston, Jan. 18, 1884, 



BT 



HON. MELLEN CHAMBERLAIN. 



BOSTON: 

PUBLISHED BY THE SOCIETY, 

Office, 83 Equitable Building, 

1884. 



JOHN ADAMS, ^'<^f 

THE STATESMAN OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. 



ADDRESS BEFORE THE WEBSTER HISTORICAL SOCIETY, AT ITS ANNUAL 

jMEETING in BOSTON, JANUARY 18, 1SS4, BY 

HON. MELLEN CHAMBERLAIN. 



ENTRANCE UPON PUBLIC LIFE. 

John Adams entered public life with the first session of 
the Continental Congress, which met at Philadelphia, 5 Sep- 
tember, 1774, and remained in the service of the country 
almost uninterruptedly until the close of his administration, 
4 March, 1801. Of this period, nine years were covered by 
the American Revolution, in wdiich he took a leading part 
and held it with undiminished zeal and constancy until the 
Treaty of Peace in 1783. It is this part of his life of which 
I am to o'ive some account. 

His iniiuence, during this period of national history, was 
mainly due to his ability ; but he was fortunate in the time 
at which he intervened in public alfairs, as also in the char- 
acter of the colony from Avhich he was a delegate to the 
Congress. 

Of his great contemporaries, Franklin w^as not a member 
until the next spring, and after a little more than a year's 
service, he went abroad on his French mission ; neither was 
Jefferson, who in later years, as a political rival, drew the 
great body of the people to his way of thinking on national 
subjects ; nor until eight years had passed away was Ham- 
ilton, of marvellous genius for statesmanship. Washington 
entered the Congress v.ith John Adams, and on his su2:<ies- 



J 



tion a year later, was transferred from civil life to the head 
of the army. 

Of the Congress of 1774, Edward Rutledge and John Jay 
were younger than John Adams ; bnt the greater part of the 
delegates were of an age which brings disqualifications for 
parliamentary leadership. John Adams was thirty-nine years 
old, and in the prime of his great powers. Peculiarities of 
temper, which in later years impaired his influence, at this 
time were a help rather than a hindrance. It must also be 
counted as his o-ood fortune that he came from Massachusetts 
Bay ; for though that colony was regarded with distrust and 
dislike by the middle and southern colonies, there were facts 
in her history, as well as something in the character of her 
people, which gave potency to her voice in the national coun- 
cils, and weight to John Adams as her leading representa- 
tive. 

Under such circumstances John Adams entered Congress, 
which he attended through the sessions of four years. Dur- 
ing this period of revolution, M'hich was also the period of 
necessary constitutit)nal reconstruction, he rendered services 
such as no other statesman rendered, and more widely, 
more profoundly, and — unless present indications prove 
fallacious — more permanent!}' impressed the political insti- 
tutions of the country than any other man who has ever lived 
in it ; and by reason of these services he l^ecame entitled to 
rank as the pre-eminent statesman of the Revolution. 

My object in this paper is to show l)y what endowments, 
by what acquisitions, and by what use of his powers, can be 
justly claimed for John Adams the first place among such 
statesmen as Samuel Adams, John Ja}', Thomas Jefferson, 
and even Benjamin Franklin. 

There were no congressional reporters in those days. The 
members were pledged to secrecy. The journals are neither 



full nor accurate, and even John Adams's own diary fails us 
at some of the most critical and interesting points ; yet his 
services, in their results, are historically clear, and not diffi- 
cult of estimation. It is more difficult, however, to estimate 
the character of the statesman who rendered these services ; 
for though his purposes were single, and his methods simple 
and direct, his character was complex. In certain aspects 
it seems to belong to no known type of the English race, nor 
can it be descril)ed in a phrase. 

HIS CHARACTEEISTICS. 

Here was a man born and bred in a narrow, provincial 
sphere, remote from the centres of liberal thought, untrav- 
elled, and separated by the ocean from those movements 
which so powerfully aifected European society in the middle 
of the eighteenth century ; and j^et, in rare combination and 
large measure, he included in his character, and exhibited by 
his life and action, the best influences of the Reformation, m 
which those movements had their remote origin. Acknowl- 
edging the supremacy of conscience, and yielding implicit 
obedience to the claims of natural and revealed religion, he 
recognized its essential unity under all its varied forms of 
manifestation, and was free from the slightest trace of big- 
otry or sectarian narrowness. He believed in civil and relig- 
ious liberty as inherent rights of the people, but under sub- 
jection, as are the forces of nature, to an intelligent and ever- 
active principle of law, which is Milton's idea of liberty. 
He was a provincial, with all the traditions of provincialism ; 
and yet, undeniably, he was the foremost advocate and most 
efficient promoter of nationality. Before the colonies had 
declared themselves independent, and for the purpose of 
promoting that measure, he advocated the formation of State 
constitutions, and the severino- of one tie which bound them 



to the mother country ; and later, when the great Declaration 
had gone forth, he strove for a closer union and the sem- 
blance, at least, of a national government under the Articles 
of Confederation. Finally, when the war had closed and 
the terms of peace were under discussion, he, more than any 
other, secured to the nation the old colonial rights in the 
fisheries of Newfoundland, opened to navigation the mouth 
of the Mississippi when under doubtful jurisdiction, pushed 
the national boundaries from the Alleghanies to the great 
river, from the Ohio to the central line of the northern lakes, 
from the Kennebec to the St. Croix, and only yielding the 
Canadas to the necessities of peace. 

It is an original, not an acquired, character we have to con- 
sider. His breadth of understandino- and liberal views were 
not exhibited for the first time after he had left his native 
province for the wider theatre of national activity, nor when 
he had been in contact Avith speculative thought in Europe, 
but while yet a bo}^ musing upon life and his possible rela- 
tions to it. 

John Adams possessed two faculties in a degree which 
distinguished him among his countrymen, and made him 
pre-eminently serviceable in a period of revolution, — the his- 
toric imagination which develops nationalit}^ from its germ, 
and clear intuitions of organic constitutional law. In these 
faculties he has never been surpassed by any American 
statesman, nor equalled save by him whose name needs no 
mention in this presence. There is evidence that from his 
youth he was accustomed to trace the growth and develop- 
ment of nationality in the great epochs of Saxon and English 
history and project it under new conditions in America ; 
and that from the earliest days of the Revolution, he saw in 
the determining force of race tendencies, united with free, 
independent government, the inevitable greatness of his 



country. This gave unity and consistency to his whole 
public career, in which respect he stands nearly alone among 
public men of equal rank. It also gave him faith when others 
doubted, courage when they quailed in the face of danger, 
and constancy when they lost heart from disasters. In the 
gloomy days which succeeded the defeats at Brandywine 
and Gennantown, when Washington and his army escaped 
destruction only by the unaccountable remissness of Howe, 
John Adams said, "These disasters will hurt us, but not ruin 
us." He had unshaken confidence in the course of free em- 
pire.' 

If we now look at some of those moral characteristics 
which marked him as a statesman, we shall find certain race 
traits which he seems to have inherited immediately from his 
British ancestry, rather than by transmission through his 
colonial progenitors. He possessed the pluck, courage and 
bull-dog tenacity which we call English, and which all 
through their history has stood them in such stead in des- 
perate civil and military encounters, often changing lost 
fields to fields of victory ; and, on the other hand, there was 
no trace in his composition of the craft, cunning or selfish- 
ness which narrow circumstances and a hundred years of 
contest with a treacherous and skulking foe are supposed, 
justly or unjustly, to have engrafted on the New England 
character of his day. 

There was no strategy in his nature. His path led straight 
to his object, and his movements in it were simple and 
direct, though not always free from ostentation and self- 

' At a meeting- of the American Academy in 1807, at the request of Dr. 
Abiel Hohiies, John Adams wrote on a slip of paper, now in my posses- 
sion, the following lines which he had seen inscribed in some forgotten 
place : — 

" The eastern nations sink; their glory ends, 
Anil Empire rises where the sun descends." 



6 



assertion, not easily understood in so great a man. In his 
victories we perceive no special skill in plan or science of 
battle ; but his eye was quick to detect the stress of the en- 
gagement, and there his honest blows fell fast and heavy. 
How clearly he saw the inevitableness of the issue, and 
how pluckily for more than a twelvemonth, in Congress, he 
fought the fight of the Declaration ; and against what odds 
— for nothing is now more clear than this, that neither the 
Congress, nor the people as a whole, were quite ripe for it. 
He carried the measure by sheer force and persistence ; and 
he was right. Yet it was one of those almost hopeless 
struggles in wdiich victory forms an epoch in the history of 
human progress. 

This directness of aim and impetuosity of movement were 
not the conventional methods, either in the lemslation or 
the diplomacy of his day, and they subjected him to some 
animadversion from those who respected his honesty and 
ability. While on his Dutch mission, in 1781, to procure a 
recognition of our independence and to effect a loan, he 
shocked the old diplomatists by his memorial to their High 
Mightinesses and the Prince of Orange. This was issued 
against the advice, and even remonstrance, of our French 
allies.' But it led to ultimate success. I think it will be 
found that John Adams was always right in his well-con- 
sidered judgments, and usually so in his measures ; if any 
part of his conduct was open to criticism, it was his 
manner.^ 

' When copies of it reached America, jMadisou, writing to Pendleton, 
said, '• I enclose a copy of Mr. Adams's memorial to the States General. 
I wish I could have informed you of its being- lodged in the archives of 
their High Mightinesses, instead of presenting it to you in print." 
Madison's Letters, i. 54. 

^ The memorial above referred to was not promulgated without mature 
consideration of the whole case. Writing a year later to Francis Dana, 



Allien the cause of independence and nationalit}' demanded 
an orator, — not brilliant declaimers like Henry, Lee and 
Rutledge, but one who, with capacity for aftairs, could 
bring- powerful and intrepid advocacy into council and pas- 
sionate a})peals to patriotic sentiment, — such an orator was 
found in John Adams, the Colossus of debate. 

These special gifts were made efl'ective by a vigorous and 
comprehensive intellect and high courage. All his powers 
were trained, and every opportunit}' for improvement em- 
braced, with an assiduity not common in America at that day. 

John Adams at his best was always a statesman ; as a 
politician he made a veiy inditlerent figure. In his country's 
ends he always succeeded — always; and in his own, quite 
likely would always have failed, had he sought any that 
were merel}^ personal. His much-derided administration, 
thouo;h conducted under great embarrassments, was useful 
to the country, and not without its period of national glory ; 
and the measure Avhich threw his cabinet into confusion was 
a bold stroke of statesmanship, conceived and persisted in 
without regard to part}' or personal interests. Ambitious, 
vain, egotistical, self-contident and jealous, — for he was all 
these, as no one knew better or has oftener told us than 
himself, — these qualities, on a superficial view, detract from 
the perfection of his character, and have cruelly interfered 
with his just fame. But they were mere exaggerations of 
harmless qualities. Beneath them all we can perceive a 
complete and well-rounded character, — large, powerful, 
active, and full of humanities, — with more of individuality 

our then unaccredited minister to St. Petersburg, he said, "I see no 
objection against your attempt, as you propose, to find out tlie real dis- 
position of the Empress, or her ministers. You cannot talie any noisy 
measures like those I have taken here. The form of the government fur- 
bids it." Works, vii. 544. 



than that of any other public man of his day. H.\s forte was 
action. "I never shall shine," he said, "till some animating 
occasion calls forth all my powers." When side-tracked in 
the vice-presidency, or finally ditched at Braintree, the engine 
puffed, and snorted, and let oif steam in a very unedifying 
manner; but on a clear course, no matter what the load or 
what the grades, it moved with the swiftness and vei^ve of the 
lightning-train — and, it maybe added, with something of 
its racket. 

In respect to a man endowed with such rich and varied 
gifts, we have a rational curiosity to know something of the 
processes of education and special training by which they 
were so supplemented that in due time this native of an 
obscure provincial town came to be regarded as the ablest 
constitutional lawyer of his day and the consummate 
orator and statesman of the Revolution. Nor are we with- 
out the means. 

riiEPARATIOX FOR TUBLIC LIFE. 

John Adams evidently was not unconscious of his powers, 
nor without ambition to make them servient to the interests 
of his country and his own honorable fame. In his youth 
he divined the coming empire of America, and formed him- 
self, I think not without prescience, for a distinguished part 
in its affairs. His self-examination was critical and unspar- 
ing. He carefully considered his life-work, as Avell as his 
own powers. To what had been given him he added much 
by reading, reflection, and conversation with those more 
mature than himself. . Of his college life we know but little ; 
l)ut on his graduation he entered upon a wide course of 
study with connnendable diligence. His diary tells us that 
he made himself acquainted with the great poets of antiquity : 
with Homer, Viroil, Horace and Ovid. He knew Shaks- 



9 



peare, Millon, Baxter and Pope, and apparently understood 
and enjoyed them. Before the adoption of the hnv as his 
profession, and for the purpose of determining his choice, he 
read with attention the works of the great divines, the 
poHtical and philosophical Avriters then in vogue, and the 
authoritative treatises in medical science. When fairly 
engaged in the study of the law, he piu'sued it with such 
success that before the age of thirty he became one of the 
best-equipped lawyers in America. 

"The study and practice of law, I am sure, does not dis- 
solve the obligations of morality or of religion," so he wrote 
at the age of twenty, as he was entering on his course of 
study ; nor did he ever forget this conviction of his unhurt 
3'outh. His work was honest throughout, and he prepared 
himself honestly for it. He did not gauge his legal studies 
to the requirements of his native Braintree, where he began 
to practise, nor by those of the metropolis in .which he was 
at one time settled. He aimed, he said, to distinguish him- 
self among his fellow-students "by the study of the civil law 
in its native tongues." With Bracton, Britton, Fleta, Glan- 
ville. Coke and Lord Hale he became familiar, as also 
with Justinian and the great commentators on the civil 
law. To these must be added Montesquieu, Blackstone 
(then recently published), Voltaire's Louis XIV., and, in 
fine, whatever was within his reach that could enlarge, en- 
rich or streno-then his understandinii' for o-raspins; the prin- 
ciples of law and constitutional government. Following the 
advice of Gridley, the Nestor of the bar, "to pursue the 
study of the law rather than the gain of it," he " labored to 
get distinct ideas of law, right, wrong, justice, equity ; to 
search for them in his own mind, in Roman, Grecian, French, 
English treatises of natural, civil, common, statute law; to 
aim at an exact knowlcdo-e of the nature, end and means of 



10 



government ; to comprire the different forms of it with each 
other, and each of them with their effects on public and pri- 
vate happiness for the advancement of right ; to assert and 
maintain liberty and virtue ; to discourage and abolish ty- 
ranny and vice." With these added extracts from his diary 
we have the whole scheme of his life : "Let little objects be 
neglected and forgot, and great ones engross, arpusc and 
exalt my soul." "I was born for business, for both activity 
and study. I have little appetite or relish for anything else. 
I must doul)le and redouble my diligence." The recorded 
lives of orreat statesmen have sometimes made us familiar 
with the aspirations and purposes of their youth ; but I re- 
call few instances where these were fixed so high, so undevi- 
atingly pursued, and so fully attained by achievements which 
have indelibl}^ impressed themselves on the happy fortunes 
of a continent. These principles, made efficient by an in- 
tellect of extraordinary power, placed him foremost among 
the lawyers of his day ; and as we read the history, of the 
country, we learn without surprise that John Adams was also 
foremost amons; those who established the freedom and na- 
tionality of America, and laid the foundation of its govern- 
ment.' When he entered public life, in 1774, he was prob- 
ably well qualitied to conduct causes and argue questions of 
public law before any tribunal sitting at Westminster, and 
to represent with distinction any English constituency in the 
House of Commons. 

' John Adams's legal erudition does not, as is so often the case among 
great lawyers, rest merely upon tradition. His dissertation on the Canon 
and Feudal LaAv, written at the age of twenty-nine, is still extant, and 
may be read with profit even in the light of later studies. It was erro- 
neously attributed to Gridley, and pronounced by Hollis, in England, 
where it was more than once reprinted, to be " one of the very finest 
I)i"oductions from Xorth America."' 



11 



Such Avtis the Di:in to whom came his hour ; and he made'it 
an epoch in history. 

John Adams was too €onspicuous to be overlooked among 
the great men of the country, and the vahie of his services 
was acknowledged by his contemporaries ; but I think they 
were not estimated at their true value. We are in a far 
better position than they were to do him complete justice. 
We understand the Revolution itself, in its causes and its 
progress, much more fully than those who were actors in 
it. The century of the national existence just closed was 
to them the dark, uncertain future ; to us it has joined the 
historic past. In it we see events in their relations and pro- 
portions which to them appeared incomplete and sometimes 
unrelated. 

CHARACTER OF THE REVOLUTION. 

But I venture to think that we shall not reach these desir- 
able results unless we unlearn some things we have been 
taught, and clear away some prejudices which have proved 
so fatal to successful historical research. AVe seem now far 
enough removed from the Revolution to study it historically, 
and not as partisans ; to be permitted to learn that then, as 
now, when people divide into parties, neither facts, nor 
right, nor conscience, are wholly on one side. Nor does 
it seem longer necessary to conceal those facts which do not 
stand for national honor, or to be compelled to guess them 
from ambiguous and often disingenuous apologies. It is 
hardly exaggeration, however, to say that we can more dis- 
passionately discuss the causes of the late civil war, and lay 
bare the motives and conduct of the men and parties engaged 
in it on either side, than the motives and conduct of men and 
parties at the beginning of the Revolution, the intrigues in 
the Congress, or the convention at Saratoga in 1777. 



12 



The result of this state of things, growing out of undue 
solicitude for the reputation of individuals and a patriotic 
disposition to exalt the successful party, is that we have 
much history that is not truth, and profitable neither for 
reproof, instruction nor guidance. 

John Adams's fame as a statesman grew out of his services 
during the American Revolution. In the endeavor to form a 
just estimate of those services, I have lieen led to consider 
that event in its inception, progress and results, and to dis- 
cover, if possible, the exact relations of John Adams to it. 

In the prosecution of this purpose I have observed some 
facts which do not appear to me to be sufficiently empha- 
sized, to say the least, in the histories of that period ; and I 
have reached some conclusions which require a fuller state- 
ment of the grounds on which they rest than is ordinarily 
found in an address of this description. 

It seems to me that we shall Ml to appreciate the true 
character of the Revolution if we restrict its entirety to the 
events which transpired between the Stamp Act of 1765 and 
the Peace of 1783 ; for, thus limited, I am unable to find ade- 
quate causes in those events when regarded in their necessary 
political sequence, or when referred in historical parallelism 
to other movements of society which have resulted in the 
disruption of governments. The causes of revolution arc 
usually i-emote from the event. No matter on what soil they 
are planted, the seeds of a new order of government germi- 
nate slowly, and only children's children are permitted to 
repose l)eneath its branches. For the history of the Revolu- 
tion we must go back to the planting of the seeds. John 
Adams is authority for this view of the subject. "The prin- 
ciples and feelings which contributed to produce the Revolu- 
tion ought to be traced back for two hundred years, and 
sought in the history of the country from the first plantations 



13 



in America." Seldom, if ever, are revolutions the spontane- 
ous action of an entire community. Their interests may be 
the same, they may sutler from a common grievance, but 
people will not think alike. Divergences of opinions are 
sure to arise, and out of these parties are formed. A contest 
ensues with vicissitudes of fortune, but ultimately terminat- 
ing in accordance with the movement of society out of which 
it springs. The American Kevolution was no exception to 
this general rule, though one might infer otherwise from 
much which passes for history. 

To understand the services which John Adams rendered 
to the country in the Revolution, it is essential to understand 
the attitude of the parties which brought it on, and, with 
great exactness, the questions which divided them in their 
inception, progress and urgency, at the time when he en- 
gaged in public affairs ; and especially so in his case, since, 
to a profound knowledge of these questions, and the forma- 
tive influence of this knowledge on his mind and character, 
was due in no small deo^ree his success in givino: direction 
and happy issue to the movement. 

The commonly received notion is, that the passage of the 
Stamp Act so clearly contravened the rights of the colonists 
as British subjects, that they with one accord rose in resistance, 
and after eight years of strife, finally achieved their indepen- 
dence. I venture to think that this is the apparent, rather 
than the real, state of the case. I think that those who 
accept it fail to perceive the true nature of this demonstration, 
and wholly overlook the vital elements of genuine revolution 
which existed in the antecedent history of the two colonies 
whose hearts were earliest en<»:ao:ed in the cause, — Virg-inia 
and Massachusetts, — and made revolution possible; and 
that of these causes, perhaps the prime cause, without which 
the Revolution would never have beffun when it did and 



14 



■svhere it did, was ecclesiastical rather than political, begin- 
ning with the settlement of the colony of Massachusetts 
Bay, and operating with unbroken succession and efficiency 
down to the commencement of hostilities. 

It also overlooks the origin and continuity of that civil 
contest which began in Massachusetts with the revocation of 
the first charter in 1684, between the friends of the royal 
Government and the champions of popular rights, in which 
parties arrayed themselves under the respective and succes- 
sive lead of Randolph and Danforth, Dudle}^ and Cooke, 
Burnett and Wells, on issues as sharply defined, involving 
the same general principles, and as hotly contested, as those 
which divided Bernard and Hutchinson from James Otis and 
Samuel Adams. 

Another misconception Avhich belittles the contest and 
detracts from the merit of the patriotic party, is that which 
regards the Tories as a mere handful of malignants, composed 
mainly of commercial adventurers and government officials, 
having no stake in the community, together with a few old 
families which, for personal aggrandizement, set themselves 
in opposition to the principles and measures of the patriots, 
and sought to compass the subjugation and ruin of the 
country in which they were born, and in which their dearest 
interests centred. 

The only remaining matter to which I shall allude, relates 
to the grounds on which the patriotic party opposed the par- 
liamentary claim of right to tax the colonists. 

In reading, the histories of those times, one is likely to 
receive the impression that the outburst of popular indigna- 
tion which pervaded the colonies on the news of the passage 
of the Stamp Act would not have occurred had the col- 
onists been represented in Parliament ; but there is no foun- 
dation for this impression. Their main objection was com- 



15 



mercial, and not political. It was to the tax, not to non- 
representation ; still less to any merely theoretical claim of 
parliamentary supremacy, as is evident from the quiet which 
followed the repeal of the act, though accompanied b}' the 
express declaration of the right to tax the colonists. And we 
are to reo;ard the resolutions of the Cono-ress of 1765, as well 
as those of the provincial assemblies in the early stages of 
the controversy, and perhaps as late as 1775, in the nature 
of protests, like the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions of a 
later day, designed, of course, to influence parliamentary 
legislation, but not as preliminaries of forcible resistance. 

But there came a time — earlier in Massachusetts than else- 
where, for reasons to be given hereafter — when all this was 
changed ; when the colonists came to understand that there 
Avere colonial constitutions as well as a British constitution, 
and that both were subject to like laws of growth and devel- 
opment ; that by the operation of these laws in the direction 
of natural rights, their own constitutions had come to l)e the 
basis and measure of their rights and immunities ; that in all 
cases, especially in internal affairs, where the imperial and 
colonial constitutional maxims conflicted, the latter Avere the 
fundamental rule of right and action ; and finally, that if the 
validity of this construction involved n reference to the uUi- 
TDU ratio, it would only be one more instance, of Avhich Eng- 
lish history is full, of that mode of settling constitutional 
questions. When the colonists came to this ground, they 
had a good fighting position, not before. Here John Adams 
stood — stood nearly alone ; altogether alone in the clearness 
with which he saw the strength of this position, and in the 
courage and pertinacity Avith Avhich he maintained it. To 
this clear constitutional ground he first led his OAvn colony, 
and finally the representatives of the thirteen colonies in 
Cono-ress assembled, in a declaration of their riahts in 1774, 



16 



and of their independence in 1776. This was his greatest 
public service ; and it was the greatest feat of statesmanship 
during the revolutionary period. He had able co-adjutors, 
but to him, more than to any other, the honor is due. This 
ground of rights under colonial constitution once taken, the 
strife was no longer rebellion, but maintenance of constitu- 
tional rights. "We are not exciting a rebellion," exclaimed 
John Adams. "Opposition, nay, open, avowed resistance by 
arms, against usurpation and lawless violence, is not rebel- 
lion by the law of God or the land." The colonists were no 
longer traitors, but patriots ; and those who undertook to 
force their position were justly deemed public enemies. 
Final success was no longer doubtful. The cause had 
aligned itself to the great movement of society, which began 
with the Reformation, in the direction of nationality, and in 
its support had secured the resources of a continent. 

MASSACHUSETTS IN THE REVOLUTION. 

These positions must now be referred to their historic ba- 
sis. It was by no accident that the Revolution broke out in 
Massachusetts Bay. It could have happened, at that time, 
nowhere else upon the continent. Nowhere else had a suc- 
cession of causes, civil and religious, operative through a 
hundred years, prepared the way for it. Hither the royal 
troops had been sent, because here they were needed to 
maintain the royal government : and to these troops the first 
armed .resistance in which blood was shed, was on the field 
of Lexington, 19 April, 1775.' 

' On this point it is scarcely necessary to quote autliorities. One will suf- 
fice. " In all the late American disturbances, and in every attempt 
against the authority of the British Parliament, the people of Massachu- 
setts Bay have taken the lead. Every new move towai'ds independence 
has been theirs ; and in every fresli mode of resistance against the law, 



17 



Stiu-ting, then, from that pltice and hour, and runnhig back 
on the line of colonial history in search of adequate causes 
not connected with antecedent causes, I find my progress 
arrested and my historic sense of cause and effect satisfied 
only by the events and motives which led to the settlement 
of the Bay in 1630. These motives were two ; religious and 
civil liberty. And the greatest of these was religious liberty. 
It was also the most efficient. And I find that these mo- 
tives, regarded as causes, continued to exist and operate in 
clear religious and political sequence, with only insignificant 
interruptions, and Avith scarcely impaired vitality, to the 
treaty of peace in that year of God of which the last was 
the happy centennial ; and that the events which occurred 
between 1765 and 17a3, though dramatically complete in 
themselves, yet historically are only the closing act of a 
drama which opened in 1630 with the coming of Winthrop 
and his Puritans. 



ECCLESIASTICISM A CAUSE OF THE EEVOLUTIOX. 

And thus the American Revolution began in the colony of 
Massachusetts Bay, and in its vital and most potent force 
was religious rather than political. This character of the 
Revolution was impressed upon it by the circumstances which 
led to the Puritan hegira from England in 1630; and those 
circumstances, only changed in form, but remaining the same 
in their essential character, continued to exist until the 

they have first set the example, and then issued out adiuonitoiy letters 
to the other colonies to follow it." Mauduit's Short View of the His- 
tory of the Xew England Colonies, 5. An address to the House. 7 Feb- 
ruary, 1775, and before the events at Lexington, proposed by the min- 
ister, and carried after great debate, declared that a rebellion already 
existed in Massachusetts, countenanced and fomented by unlawful com- 
binations in the other Colonies. Hildreth, Hist. U.i^. iil. 61. 



18 



events at Lexington in 1775 notified the Bishop of London, 
as well as the Kino- of Enoland, that the descendants of the 
Puritans had referred both the polemics of the hierarchy and 
the casuistry of parliamentary supremac}' to the decision of 
war. The motive which led to the Puritan emigration was 
rclio'ious rather than civil. It was from the crozier rather 
than the sceptre — from Laud and the High Commission 
rather than Charles the First — that the Puritans fled.' 

They came hither to escape the hierarchy of the Church of 
England and to set up one of their own. And it was in 
defence of this domestic hierarchy — though civil and reli- 
gious liberty were indissolubly connected in their minds — 
that the clergy of New England, alone of all the professional 
or propertied classes, arrayed themselves on the popular side. 

In the middle and southern colonies, as well as in New 
England, there had been political contests with the represen- 
tatives of the Crown. All the colonies were dissatisfied with 
the Navigation Laws and Acts of Ti'ade, and the exercise 
of the royal prerogatives; but out of New England, the colo- 
nists, who were mainly of the Church of England, — certainly 
not Puritans, — became quiet as the enforcement of these 
laws was relaxed or evaded. But in New England, and 
especially in Massachusetts, disquietude prevailed unceas- 
ingly, and the Revolutionary cause, when no other disturbing 

' "Independence of English Churoh and State was the fundamental 
principle of the first colonization, has been its general principle for 
two hundred }'ears, and now, I hope, is past disinite. ^Vho, then, was the 
author, inventor, discoverer, of independence"? The only true answer 
must be. the first emigrants. When we saj' that Otis. Adams. INIayhew, 
Henry, Lee, Jefterson, &c., were authors of independence. Ave ought to 
say they were only awakeuers and revivers of the original fundamental 
principle of colonization."' John Adams's Works, x. 359. "It is certain 
that civil dominion was but the secondary motive, religious the primary, 
with our ancestors in coming hither and settling this land." President 
Stiles, American Pulpit, xxx. 



19 



element was upparent, fluctuated with the efforts of the Bishop 
of London to establish Episcopacy in New England. For 
the accomplishment of this end there was the ever present, 
always active motive of sectarian zeal for the propagation of 
religious faith, and still more of ecclesiastical government. 
To this was added a special reason in the dissatisfaction of 
the Church-of-England people in Massachusetts, to whom 
Puritanic ways were displeasing. This class, consisting in the 
early days chiefly of crown oflicialsand commercial sojourners, 
was not large, but increasing sufiiciently so as to excite the 
commiseration of the Bishop of London, as sheep without 
a shepherd, and wandering in unconsecrated pastures. His 
efforts for their relief kept the Puritans in hot water for 
more than seventy years, and gave rise to a mutual dislike 
which became hereditary. In their resistance to Episcopacy 
the Massachusetts people were regarded in England as 
bigoted religionists and refractory subjects. And so were 
they by the people of the colonies out of New England ; a 
fact never to be lost sight of in tracing the progress of the 
Revolution. For the middle and southern colonies had been 
settled or become possessed by people in sympathy with the 
Church of England, or at least having no special cause of 
hostility to it, — as was the case with the Puritans, — under 
whose ministrations they Avere contented, with loyalty to the 
King, to Avorship God after the manner of their fathers. 

To this grateful privilege of ecclesiastical relationship was 
added a pecuniary advantage, so long as the Society ibr the 
Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts liberally expended 
the contributions of the piously disposed churchmen of the 
mother country in establishing parishes, erecting church edi- 
flces, and paying the salaries of missionaries in colonial ter- 
ritor3^ To this they saw no more objections than occur to 
the minds of our frontier settlers to the benevolent opera- 



20 



tions of the Home Missionary Society. But to the Puritans 
of Massachusetts, scattering the seeds of Episcopacy was 
sowing tares by the Evil One. To escape from soul-destroy- 
ing confOTmity, their fathers had tied their pleasant homes in 
Lincolnshire, and set up their altars in a bleak and sterile 
wilderness. They had come hither, not so much to erect a 
state as a church ; and if, after a time, the two became one, 
that one was the church-state, not the state-church, between 
which there is an immense difference. They set it up for 
themselves, not for others. To that liberality of toleration 
they made no pretension, as is so often forgotten. To their 
new home came unwelcome intruders ; and with them came 
trouble. I am now to ti-ace this history.' Laud, at the head 

' Some years since, I noticed facts in ecclesiastical liistory apparently 
of more importance in tlie Revolutionary struggle than had been ac- 
corded to them by historians ; and later, special study has contirmed this 
impression. This reticence on the part of those wlio wrote early on the 
war of the Revolution had been observed by Bouclier, the Tory clergyman 
of Virginia, and by him attributed to some discreditable motive, such as 
a disposition to conceal the Puritan narrowness which would exclude 
Episcopalians from the privileges of cliurch worship after their form. 
View of the Causes of the Revolution, 148. Bancroft and Hildreth have 
treated the subject as fully, perhaps, as the necessary regard to propor- 
tions in a general history would permit ; but neither, so as to apprise tlie 
reader how early and how continuous!}^, nor, 1 think, how efficiently, 
ecclesiasticism operated as a cause of the Revolution. Hildreth. who 
treats the subject more fully and more directly than Bancroft, says, "The 
Congregational ministers of New England, an intelligent and very influ- 
ential body, headed at this period by Chauncy and Cooper, of Boston, clier- 
ished a traditionary sentiment of opposition to British control. — a senti- 
ment strengthened, of late years, by the attempts of the Englisli Society 
for the Propagation of the Gospel to build up Episcopacy in New England 
by supporting there some thirt/ Episcopal missionaries. An unseasonable 
revival of the scheme for a bishop in tlie colonies had recently excited a 
bitter controversy, in which, since Mayhew's deatli, Chauncy liad come 
forward as the Congregational champion; a controversy which could 



21 



of the High Commission, began the assault on the expatriated 
Puritans in 1634, but the civil wars prevented further efforts 
to set up Episcopacy until the Restoration. The contention, 
however, did not cease when Presbyterianism became the 
State religion under the Commonwealth, since the adherents 
of that ecclesiastical polity sought to introduce it into Massa- 
chusetts. This the Puritans resisted as strenuously as they 
had resisted prelacy. They had established independent 

only tend to confirm the Congregational body in hostilitj^ to the extension 
of English influence." Hist. U.S. iii. 55. 

There is a very interesting letter written by John Adams to Dr. 
Morse in 1815, the whole of which should be read by those who would 
know the views of one most competent to speak on this subject. The 
following extract will serve to show some foundation at least for the 
view I have taken in the text ; and I may add, had I met with it earlier in 
mj' reading, it would have saved me much research, and the reader some 
pages of my own : — 

" Where is the man to be found at this day. when we see Methodisti- 
cal bishops, bishops of the Church of England, and bishops, archbishops 
and Jesuits of the Church of Eome, with indiflerence, who will believe that 
the apprehension of Episcopacy contributed fifty years ago, as much as 
any other cause, to arouse the attention, not only of the inquiring mind, but 
of the common people, and urge them to close thinking on the constitu- 
tional authoritj' of Parliament over the Colonies? This, nevertheless, was 
a fact as certain as any in the history of Xorth America. The objection 
was not merelj^ to the office of a bishop, though even that was dreaded, 
but to the authority of Parliament, on which it must be founded. ... If 
Parliament can erect dioceses and appoint bishops, they may introduce 
the whole hierarchy, establish tithes, forbid marriages and funerals, estab- 
lish religions, forbid dissenters." Works, x. 185. 

At an earlier date he had said, "It is true that the people of thiS coun- 
try in general, and of this province in special, have an hereditary appre- 
hension of, and aversion to. lordships, temporal and spiritual. Their 
ancestors fled to this wilderness to avoid them, — they suttered suffi- 
ciently under them in England. And there are few of the present gener- 
ation who have not been warned of the danger of them by their fathers 
and grandfathers, and enjoined to oppose them. ISTovanglus, February 
13, 1775. 



22 

churches, and determined they should remain such. They 
agreed with John Milton, — 

New Presbyter is but Old Priest writ large. 

But the Eestoration of Charles II. renewed the strife under 
its old form — resistance to Anglicanism. For, as soon as 
the domestic affairs of the realm would permit, royal com- 
missioners were sent over to inquire into the reports from 
Massachusetts Bay, " that his subjects in those parts did not 
submit to his government, but looked upon themselves as 
independent upon him and his laws ; " and with instructions 
"to take care that such orders were established there that 
the Act of Navigation should be punctually observed ; " and 
to send home a detailed report of the frame and constitution 
of the local government in Church and Staie.'^ 

The significance of these directions was clear to the colo- 
nists when they found their old enemy, the Church-of-Eng- 
land Samuel Maverick, among the commissioners. This 
unfriendly scrutiny into their ecclesiastical and civil affairs 
was met by the colonists with infinite skill and patience, if 
not with entire candor ; for nobody knew better than them- 
selves that they had claimed and exercised substantial sover- 
eignty in Church and State, and that they were determined 
to yield it only in the direst extremity. In that extremity 
they soon found themselves ; but neither they, nor their 
descendants, ceased to resist the introduction of prelacy, 
until armed resistance at the Revolution involved the thirteen 
colonies in a strife which had its origin in a question of local 
polemics. 

In 1684 the enemies of the Puritan Church overthrew the 
old charter under which the colonists had been allowed to 
manage civil and ecclesiastical affjiirs in a very free and in- 
dependent way. What of disaster to civil and religious lib- 

' Palfrey, Hist. ii. 584. 



23 



erty, as the Puritans understood these terms, this change 
imported, soon became evident. It overthrew their consti- 
tution of government ; it contiscated the title to their lands 
and all improvements on them, and it imperilled their cher- 
ished form of church government. The significance of the 
loss of their c*liarter, in its infiuence upon the hundred years 
of controversy which ensued, will not be fully appreciated, 
unless we keep in mind that ecclesiastical, as Avell as civil, 
causes led to that result. It was not merely that the colo- 
nists had disobeyed the Navigation laws, coined money, and 
performed other acts of civil sovereignty, that Charles's com- 
missioners were sent on their errand of inquiry. In fiict, the 
formation of the commission was instigated in the colony 
itself by those whose chief grievance was, that they had 
suffered under the strictness of the Puritan hierarch}', in 
not being permitted those consolations to be found by them 
only in the bosom of the Anglican Church. "They discoiui- 
tenance the Church of England," was the constant complaint 
to the Privy Council by Randolph, the memory of whose 
malign influence, as the evil genius of New England, still 
survives in tradition as well as in recorded history. 

The new order of things under the presidency of Dudley 
began 25 May, 1686, and the day following the Eev. ]Mr. 
Ratclifte, who had been sent over by the Bishop of London 
to institute Episcopal worship, waited upon the Council. 
Mason and Randolph, members of that l)ody, proposed that 
he should be allowed one of the three Puritan meeting- 
houses to preach in ; and in June the first Anglican church 
in New England was organized at Boston. The next year 
the Old South meeting-house was virtually seized by Andros, 
Avho had succeeded Dudle}', and used for the Church of 
England service. "If," says Palfrey, "the demand had 
been for the use of the bnildiuii" for a mass, or for a 



24 



carriage-house for Juggernaut, it could scarcely have been 
to the generality of people more offensive." ' But the 
Bevolution of 1G89, of which the detestation of Episcopacy 
was one of the chief causes, swept away Andros and his 
government, and the Puritan Zion had comparative peace 
until 1699, when the Earl of Bellomont, the*first Church- 
of-Eugland governor under the new charter, arrived. He 
was attached to the communion of his church, which he at- 
tempted to revive in Boston. In this he was encouraged 
by the Bishop of London, the diocesan for America, and 
the Lords of Trade, who interested themselves to obtain for 
the colonists the advantages of ecclesiastical supervision.^ 
And from this time down to the breaking out of the war. 
Bishops Tenison, Sherlock and Seeker were successively^ 
active in promoting the establishment of an Anglican hier- 
archy, with resident l)ishops, in America ; and in 1761, there 
were in New England thirty missionaries who had l)een sent 
over by the Proj)agation Society. 

For nearly a hundred years preceding the Revolution, 
these efforts to estalilish Episcopacy in Massachusetts were 
causes of anxiety and alarm. On the anniversary of the 
death of Charles the First, January 30, 1750, twenty-tive 
years before the Avar broke out, Dr. Jonathan Mayhew, of 
Boston, preached a discourse Avhich became famous on both 

' Wliat also gave great oftenee, the Quakers aud Dissenters were en- 
couraged by the Governoi- to refuse payment of the taxes levied hj^ 
the towns for tlie suppoi't of the ministers. The celebrating of marriages, 
no longer exercised by tlie magistrates, as had been the case under the 
old charter, was confined to Episcopal clergymen, of whom there was 
but one in the province. It was necessary to come to Boston in order to 
bo married. Hildreth, Hist. U.S. ii. 110, 111. 

- 'J'he zeal of William's colonial governors on behalf of the Church of 
England originated quite as much in political as in religious motives. 
Comnuinity of religions, it was thought, would be a security for political 
obedience. Ih. 214. 



25 



sides of the Atlantic, in which he attacked the doctrines of 
the divine right of kings, passive obedience, and the exchi- 
sive claims of the Episcopal hierarchy. A sentence from 
the preface to the published sermon will indicate its character 
and temper : " People have no security against being unmer- 
cifully priest-ridden but by keeping all imperious bishops, 
and other clergymen who love to lord it over God's heritage, 
from getting their feet into the stirrup at all." It breathes 
an intense spirit of religious and civil liberty, and did much 
to intensify the colonial hatred of the threatened Episcopal 
hierarchy. In this it expressed — perhaps inspired — the 
sentiments of Samuel Adams, and was one of the most pow- 
erful influences which kept alive the spirit of revolution, 
and finally prepared the minds of the Massachusetts colonists 
for open resistance. The following extracts will show how 
continuous was the expressed hostility to Episcopacy, — a 
feeling not confined to the ignorant, illiberal crowd, but 
shared by the most enlightened of the colonists : — 

Samuel Adams, as the voice of the House of Representa- 
tives, presumably expressing the sentiments of the people, 
in a letter to their agent in London, in 1768, said, "The 
establishment of a Protestant Episcopate in America is also 
very zealously contended for ; and it is very alarming to a 
people whose fathers, from the hardships they suffered under 
such an establishment, were obliged to fly their native coun- 
try into a wilderness. . . . AVe hope in God such an 
establishment will never take place in America, and we de- 
sire you would strenuously oppose it. The revenue raised 
in America, for aught we can tell, may be as constitutionally 
applied towards the support of prelacy as of soldiers and 
pensioners." ' 

• AVells's Life of Sam. Adams, i. 157. 



26 



Dr. Andrew Eliot, the enliijhtened clerofvman who de- 
clined the presidency of Harvurd College, in one of a series 
of letters chiefly on this subject, written between 1768 and 
1771, addressed to Thomas Hollis, in England, said, "The 
people of New England are greatly alarmed ; the arrival of 
a bishop would raise them as much as any one thing." ' 

As late as 1772, the Boston Committee of Correspondence 
appointed to state the rights of the colonists, in their report 
made in Faneuil Hall, among other things declared, "that 
various attempts have been made, and (ire now made, to es- 
tablish an American Episcopate ;" though " no power on earth 
can justly give temporal or sjoiritual jurisdiction within this 
province except the General Court." ^ 

It may be difficult for us who live under the mild and 
beneficent influence of Episcopacy to understand the alarm 
which its proposed introduction occasioned to the most 
liberal minds among our New England ancestors during the 
century which immediately preceded the Revolution. Mak- 
ing all due allowances for the exaggerated apprehensions of 
the common people, I mean those who were ready to mob a 
bishop, as well as for the personal pecuniary interest which 
the clero^y of the ruling order had in resistins; encroachments 
upon their establishment, there was, at that time, a real 
danger to civil liberty, as it existed under democratic forms, 
in the attitude and claims of the Anglican hierarchy. Nor 
was New England alone in this state of alarm. There were 
many in Old England, some high in the Church itself % who 

' Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll. xxxiv. 492. Tudor's Life of Otis, 136. 

'^ Thornton's Amer. Pulpit, 192; and see Adams's Works, ix. 287. 288. 

^ English Dissenters, with some churchmen, were in full accord with their 
American brethren on this subject. Archdeacon Blackburne says, '• They 
knew the hardships of those legal disabilities under which they them- 
selves lay at home. They had good reason to believe that the influence 
of the established hierarchy contributed to continue this grievance. Their 



27 



deprecated the reactionary tendency towards the exercise of 
the temporal powers. In both countries the question was 
the same at the period of our Revolution, and had been for 
a hundred and^ fifty years. During this period the Puritans 
in Old England who abided the result of the contest on their 
native soil, and their descendants, finally threw ofl'the excess 
of prelatical domination, with its included doctrines of the 
divine right and passive obedience, and relegated Episcopacy, 
in all but the name, to the exercise of its spiritual functions, 
restrained the power of the nobles, extinguished that of the 
sovereign, and raised the people, through the commons, to 
their true place in the body ^Dolitic. To accomplish this, 
cost one king his head, another his crown, and the people 
themselves untold treasures of blood and money. 

Some of the Puritans sought quiet by flight into the New 
England wilderness ; but in vain. They found no exemption 
in that w^ar. The spirit of ecclesiastical domination followed 
them, and for a century and a half they strenuously resisted 
the re-imposition of that sj^stem which their brethren at 
home were endeavoring to throw ofl\ The contest was 
essentially the same on both sides of the Atlantic, and con- 
tinued down to the Revolution, of which it was one of the 
principal causes. During this long contest, names often 
changed, and the evils experienced on one side of the water, 
and feared on the other, were mitigated by the lapse of time 
and the general progress of the age. But the principle con- 
tended for, civil and religious liberty, remained to the end. 

brethren in America were as yet free from it, and if bishops were let in 
among them, and particularly under the notion of presiding in established 
churches, there was the highest probability they would take their prece- 
dents of government and discipline from the establishment in the mother 
countrj^, and would probably never be at rest till they had established it 
on the basis of an exclusive test. They knew their American bretlu-en 
tjiought on this subject just as they themselves did." "Works, ii. 73. 



28 



The claim of the high churchmen was, "that every country 
acts naturally and prudently in making the ecclesiastical 
polity conformable to its civil government." This was a 
proposition which neither the early nor the later Puritans 
would care to dispute, since they acted upon it themselves. 
Their contention was that, their civil ofovernment beino- essen- 
tially democratic, their ecclesiastical system should be the 
same. They opposed the engrafting of the prelatical system, 
which was monarchical, upon their system, which was re- 
publican, well knowing the tendency of ecclesiasticisra to 
draw to itself the civil government. They saw Monarchy 
and Episcopacy as correlated facts, and in resisting the 
latter, they resisted the former. Such was their view of 
the case ; nor were the facts against them. 

The Church of England, so far as it had a civil establish- 
ment, was the creature of Parliament. It looked up to the 
king as its head, and to the Parliament as its laAvgiver. 
Its creed and book of prayer were established by statute. 
It could not reform its own abuses. Through Parliament, 
the laitv amended and reo;ulated the Church. The election 
of the l)ishops by the clergy was only nominal. The purity 
of spiritual influence was tarnished by this strict subordina- 
tion to the temporal power.' This was the system. Its ad- 
ministration was still more objectionable to the Puritans. Its 
establishment in New Ens^land meant a return to that state 
of ecclesiastical and civil affairs from which they had suffered 
so much, and from which they fled to the privations and suf- 
ferings of an inhospitable wilderness.^ So at least they 

' Bancroft, Hist., ed. 1883, iii. 4. 

^ The Episcopate would legitimately bring iu tlie whole system of 
canon ecclesiastical courts, in contravention of the constitutional judicial 
powers of tlie provincial courts; nor would tlie colonists listen to the 
suggestion that the bishop's power would be merely spiritual, for thej^ 
feared that, as Mayhew expressed it, if the bishop's foot was once in the 
stirrup the people would be effectually priest-ridden. 



29 



regaixlecl it, and the efforts of the Anglican hierarchy down 
to the Revohition never permitted this feeling to subside. 
Under the old charter, the churches, with the consent of the 
General Court, called their synods, Avhich laid down or modi- 
fied their platform of religious faith and ecclesiastical govern- 
ment according to the convictions of a body of professed 
christians. But when the Congreo;ational ministers of 
Massachusetts, as late as 1725, memorialized the General 
Court for permission to hold a synod, the Bishop of London, 
instigated by the Anglican clergy of Boston, brought the 
matter to the attention of the home government ; and 
Yorke, afterwards Lord Hardwicke, then Attorney General, 
and the Solicitor General, gave as their official opinion: 1. 
That synods cannot lawfully be held without the royal 
license. 2. That an application to the provincial legislature 
was a contempt of the sovereign; and, 3. That if notice of 
this should find them (the synod) in session, the Lieutenant 
Governor should " signify to them . . . that they do forbear 
to meet any more ; " and, if they persevere, "that the prin-. 
cipal actors therein be prosecuted by information for misde- 
meanors." ' This incident of colonial history shows that the 
objection to Anglicanism was not merely theoretical, for it 
invaded the constitution of the civil government. Its adhe- 
rents were generally on* the side of prerogative ; and John 
Adams has recorded in his diary, in 1765, that "the Church 
people are, many of them, favorers of the Stamp Act at 
present." ^ 

However we of the present generation may choose to 
regard the apprehensions of the Massachusetts Puritans and 
their descendants late into the last century, in respect to the 
designs of the Anglican hierarchy, this fact — and it is the 

' Palfrey, iv. 454. 
- Works, ii. 168, 348. 



30 



only fact of present interest — remains clear : that the 
series of events — and it is their continuity which should be 
particularly noticed — which stand to the Revolution in the 
relation of operative sequence, if not primarily of cause and 
effect, began in Massachusetts Bay with the coming of the 
Puritans ; and that these events were religious as well as 
civil, unless the true expression would be, — religious rather 
than civil. 

ECCtESIASTICISM IN VIRGINIA. 

Nor was the ecclesiastical element as a cause of the Revo- 
lution restricted to Massachusetts. It entered into the con- 
troversy — was one of the causes of the Revolution — in 
Virginia, as well as in Massachusetts : but with a diflerence. 
The Puritans fled to Massachusetts because they hated Angli- 
canism : the cavaliers fled to Virginia because they hated 
Puritanism. The Puri-tan hostility to Anglicanism was 
based upon the profoundest religious conviction. It was 
transmitted to their children, and ever associated with the 
trials and sufte rings of the first generation. It was kept 
alive by the unintermitting eflbrts of the English hierarchy 
to establish its ecclesiastical system in the Puritan colonies. 
Whatever may have been the feelings of the Virginia Church- 
men in the days of the Revolution towards the Congrega- 
tionalists of New England, owing to circumstances which 
will be presently narrated, they came together on the ground 
of hostility to Anglicanism, which, as has already been said, 
was a cause of the Revolution. 

It was one cause :' no one claims that it was the sole cause. 

' Jonathan Boucher, writing- from the extreme High Church view, jjuts 
this matter in an interesting light. " That the American opposition to 
Episcopacy was at all connected with that still more serious one so soon 
afterwards set up against civil government, was not indeed generalh' ap- 
parent at the time [in Virginia] ; but it is now [1797] indisputable, as it 



31 



And it has been dwelt upon at some length, not onl}' because 
it seems to have failed of due recoguition in the historical 
accounts of that event, but also since a clear understanding of 
the matter is essential to a correct view of the position of 
Samuel Adams, the Puritan, one of the prime movers of the 
Revolution, as well as somewhat by way of contrast, of John 
Adams, its great statesman.' 

The union between Massachusetts and Virginia in the 
Revolution has been alluded to ; a union which, considering 
the respective origin and history of the two colonies, was 
incongruous, and almost grotesque ; a union of the descend- 
ants of the fanatical Puritans and of the High Church loyal- 

also is that the former contributed not a httle to render the latter suc- 
cessful. As therefore this controversy was clearly one great cause that led 
to the Eevolution, the view of it here given, it is hoped, will not be 
deemed wholly uninteresting." View, 150. 

' The difference was this : Samuel Adams was a Pmltan and Calvinist 
of the strictest sect. John Adams strenuously dissented from Calvinism, 
but firmly adhered to the doctrines of the Puritans concerning civil and 
religious liberty, and regarded with equal aversion the designs of the 
Anglican hierarchy. His dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 
already alluded to, was a ^' Tract for the Times.'* It was printed in the 
year of the Stamp Act, 1765, when he was twenty-nine years old, and 
shows how inseparably ecclesiastical and political tyranny were asso- 
ciated in his mind as things of present dread, and also how thoroughly 
he had studied the questions on which in later years he exercised a 
commanding influence. He was fully in accord Avith Maj-hew, Chaun- 
cy. Eliot and Samuel x\dams in their hostility to the Anglican preten- 
sions and endeavors to establish an Episcopate in the colonies. At the 
age of twenty, he asked, "Where do we find a precept in the Gospel 
requiring ecclesiastical synods, convocations, councils, decrees, creeds, 
confessions, oaths, subscriptions, and whole cart-loads of other trumpery 
that we find religion encumbered with in these days?" Works, ii. 5, 6. 
"Honesty, sincerity and openness I esteem essential marks of a good 
mind. I am, therefore, of opinion that men ought (after they have 
examined with unbiased judgments every system of religion, and chosen 
one system on their own authority, for themselves) to avow their opin- 
ions? and defend them with Ijoldness." Works, ii. 8. 



32 



ists, of the rounclhecad and of the cavaHer. And yet these 
two colonies entered the contest earlier than any other, — 
Virginia the earlier, if it is regarded as merely civil, — and 
were mntually helpful and steadfast to the end. This phe- 
nomenal embrace requires explanation to the bystanders, 
from both parties. 

The religion of Virginia was Anglican, and it was the 
established religion, with the canons, the liturgy and the 
catechism. The anniversary of the execution of Charles I. 
was a legal fiist, and the restoration of Charles 11. was a 
holiday. Besides their glebes and parsonages, a maintenance 
was secured to the parish ministers in valuable and current 
commodities of the country ; and the New England laws 
against Quakers, says Hildreth, to whom I am indebted for 
this paragraph, were in full force.' 

Devotion to the Church was a test of devotion to the king- 
as its head and defender, and non-conformity was identified 
with republicanism and disloyalty.^ 

The following extract will serve not only to show the 
views of a Virginia Anglican, but it also throws nmch light 
upon the attitude of the New England congregationalists in 
relation to the introduction of Episcopacy : " The constitu- 
tion of the Church of England is approved, confirmed and 
adopted by our laws, and interwoven with them. No other 
form of church government than that of the Church of Eng- 
land would be compatible with the form of our civil govern- 
ment. No other colony has retained so large a portion of 
the monarchical part of the British Constitution as Virginia ; 
and between that attachment to monarchy and the govern- 
ment of the Church of England there is a strong connexion."' 

' Hist. i. 512. 

* Thompson's Church and State, 34, 35. 

^ Boucher's View, 103. 



The aspect in which the New Enghmders appeared to the 
people of Virginia, and the obstacles to be surmounted in 
securing their cordial co-operation in the Revolution, may 
be seen m the same author: "That a people [Virginians] in 
full possession and enjoyment of all the peace and all the 
security which the best government in the world can give, 
should, at the instigation of another people [New England- 
ers] , for whom they entertained an hereditar}' national dis- 
esteem, confirmed by their own personal dislike, suddenly 
and unprovoked, and in contradiction to all the opinions they 
had heretofore professed to hold on the subject of govern- 
ment, rush into a civil war against a nation tliey loved , . . 
is one of those instances of inconsistency in human conduct 
wdiich are often met with in real life, but which, set down in 
a book, seem marvellous, romantic and incredible. This, 
however, is an unexaggerated description of the general tem- 
per of mind which prevailed in the people of Virginia and 
Maryland towards those of New England." ' 

One more extract from the same writer will show the 
approach of Virginia and Massachusetts to the same ground : 
"When it is recollected that till now [1771] the opposition 
to an American Episcopate has been confined chiefly to the 
demagogues and independents of the New England prov- 
inces, but that it is now espoused with much warmth l)y the 
people of Virginia, it requires no great depth of [)olitical 
sagacity to see what the motives and views of the former 
have been, or what will be the consequences of the defection 
of the latter."' 

It is now desirable to understand by what circumstances 

' Boucher, xxxiv. This writer suggests in a note that the New Eng- 
landers endeavored to overcome these prejudices by pitching on Mr. 
Randolph, a Virginian, to be the first president of Congress, and on Mr. 
Wasliington. who was also a Virginian, to command the American army. 

^ lb. 103. 



34 



two provinces so dissimilar in their form of government, 
religion, social life, and general habits of thought, were 
brought together on the common ground of hostility to 
Episcopacy, which was so considerable a cause of the Revo- 
lution. 

There were Puritans in Virginia, though but a handful, 
who, in the early days of the colony, had established rela- 
tions with their New England brethren. Commercial rela- 
tions also existed between these 'colonies, and some points 
in their civil historj^ were not dissimilar. Both had suffered 
from the repeal of their charters, and both had lived in 
chronic dissatisfaction with the mother country ; and if, at 
any time and for any cause, the Revolution had failed in 
Massachusetts, it would not have been hopeless until it had 
also failed in Virginia. But on these two colonies it rested. 
The constitution of Virginia, when compared with that of 
Massachusetts, was monarchical, and, as has been said, her 
religion was Anglican, and it was the established religion. 

ECCLESIASTICISM IN VIRGINIA TOLITICS. 

In 1740 there was not, so far as is known, a single Dis- 
senting congregation in Virginia; Init in 1770, there were 
eleven Dissenting ministers regularly settled, who had each 
from two to four congregations under his care. ' 

At the Revolution, and for thirty years l)efore, Virginia 
had been making- strenuous efforts to throw off the Ano-lican 
system, so far, at least, as related to its temporal powers ; 
and during the same period, as always, Massachusetts was 
as strenuously resisting its imposition. In this respect they 
were alike. But the resemblance ends here. In the latter 
colony, it was essentially a question of civil and religious 

' Bouchoi-, 100. 



35 



liberty ; in tlie former, it was essentially a question of taxa- 
tion . 

Every one is familiar with the case between the clergy of 
the Established Church in Virginia and the planters, known 
as the "Parsons' Case," which gave first occasion to Pat- 
rick Henry for the display of his unrivalled eloquence. It 
arose out of a question of tithes, in substance, and has a 
twofold significance in Eevolutionary history. In the first 
place, it served to undermine the influence of the Anglican 
hierarchy; and secondly, it drew into question the right of 
Parliament to set aside a Virginia law respecting a matter 
essentially domestic, — this very matter of tithes. Singularly 
enough, it united ecclesiastical and civil questions as causes 
of the Revolution in Virginia, as they had been united, yet 
with a difference, in Massachusetts from the beo'innins: of 
her settlement. 

If we desire to know the attitude of some of the Virgin- 
ians, — how many, is only matter of conjecture, — near the 
time when the war broke out, we have the most authentic 
intelligence. Madison, writing to Bradford in Pennsylvania, 
in April, 1774, says, "Our Assembly is to meet the 1st of 
May, when it is expected something will be done in behalf of 
the Dissenters. Petitions, I hear, are already forminij amonof 
the persecuted Baptists, and I fancy it is in the thoughts of 
the Presbyterians also, to intercede for greater liberty in 
matters of religion. . . . The sentiments of our people of 
fortune and fashion, in this respect, are vastly different from 
what you have been used to. That lil)eral, catholic and 
equitable way of thinking, as to the rights of conscience, 
which is one of the characteristics of a free people, and so 
strongly marks the people of your province, is but little 
known among the zealous adherents of our hierarchy. . . . 
Besides, the clergy are a numerous and powerful body, have 



36 



great influence at home by reason of their connection with, 
and dependence on, the bishops and Crown, and will naturally 
employ all their arts and interest to depress their rising ad- 
versaries, for such they must consider Dissenters who rob 
them of the good-will of the people, and may, in time, en- 
danger their livings and security." In the previous January, 
he wrote to the same, "I want again to breathe your free 
air. . . . Poverty and luxury prevail among all sorts ; pride, 
ignorance and knavery among the priesthood. . . . This is 
bad enough, but it is not the worst I have to tell you. . . . 
There are at this time in the adjacent county not less than 
five or six well-meaning men in close jail for publishing their 
religious sentiments, which, in the main, are very orthodox." 
In another letter to the same, he says what is much to the 
point, "If the Church of England had been the established 
and general religion in all the northern colonies, as it has 
been among us here, and uninterrupted tranquillity had pre- 
vailed throughout the continent, it is clear to me that slavery 
and subjection might and would have been gradually insinu- 
ated among us." ' 

From the foregoing extracts, it is obvious how Madison 
reo^arded the efforts of the New Enoland Puritans in -their 
resistance to the imposition of Episcopacy ; but that he was 
not pleased with all their conduct, appears from the follow- 
ing : " I congratulate you on your heroic proceedings in 
Philadelphia with regard to the tea. I wish Boston may 
conduct matters with as much discretion as they seem to do 
with boldness." This is also relevant to the Revolution : 
" I verily believe the frequent assaults that have been made 
on America (Boston especially) will in the end prove of 
real advantage." ^ 

' Letters of Madison, i. 10 et seq. 

^ lb. 10. In stating the motives Avhich drew the people into the Eevolu- 



37 



From the foregoing outline of a phase of ecclesiastical his- 
tory in the Massachusetts Colony may be seen how early, as 
well as continuously, the religious element operated as a 
cause of the Revolution ; and how — and yet with what dif- 
ference — Virginia came to stand on the same ground with 
the former colony. 

ORIGIN or THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION IN MASSACHUSETTS. 

Although ecclesiasticism stands first among the causes 
which prepared the Massachusetts colonists for the Revolu- 
tion, and was influential in precipitating that event, yet the 
event itself was a disruption of the civil and political relations 
between the contending parties, and as such should be traced 
to its origin. 

Soon after the restoration of Charles II., the colonies came 
to have a common grievance in the operation of the Naviga- 
tion Laws and Acts of Trade,' which were designed to pour 

tion, it ought not to be concealed that there were some not altogether cred- 
itable. Madison gives this : "As to the sentiments of the people of this 
Colony with respect to the Bostonians [in regard to the Port Bill], I can as- 
sure you I find tliem very warm in their favor. ... It must not be denied, 
though, that the Europeans, especially the Scotch, and some interested 
merchants among the natives, discountenance such proceedings as far as 
they dare, alleging the injustice and perfidy of refusing to pay our debts 
to our generous creditors at home." Ih. 16. Boucher is more explicit on 
this subject. He says, "Among other circumstances favorable to a revolt 
of America, tliat of the immense debt owing by the colonists to the mer- 
chants of Great Britain deserves to be reckoned as not the least. It was 
estimated at three millions sterling ; and such is the spirit of adventure 
of British merchants, and of such extent are their capitals and their 
credit, tliat not many years ago I remember to have heard the amount of 
their debts to this country calculated at double that sum : it is probably 
now trebled." View, xl. 

^ '• If any man wishes to investigate thoroughly the causes, feelings and 
principles of the Eevolution, he must study this Act of Navigation and the 
Acts of Trade." And of tliose who wrote in favor of their enforcement. 



38 



the wealth of commerce into the lap of England, and, by the 
prohibition of certain manufactures in the colonies, to create 
a market for English productions ; but previous to the Stamp 
Act, there was no British regulation which produced the 
same practical results in all the colonies. Most of the manu- 
factures were in New England, while her lumber and the 
tobacco of Virginia — for cotton was not yet, and rice and 
indigo were grown only on a limited territory of the Carolinas 
— constituted the bulk of American commerce. These cir- 
cumstances served to bring Massachusetts and Virginia to the 
same platform in the Kevolution. They also explain in some 
degree the backwardness of some other colonies whose in- 
terests were less severely affected by the British commercial 
policy. But these resemblances in certain facts of Massa- 
chusetts and Virginia afiairs in their relation to the common 
cause should not lead us to overlook the essential differences 
in their civil and ecclesiastical history. 

Massachusetts history more immediately concerns us. 
Whatever rights the king may have intended to confer upon 
the members of the Massachusetts Company by their charter 
of 4 March, 1629, two things are clear. First, it is clear 
that the charter is susceptible of a legal interpretation which 
makes it the basis of a government proper, with ver}^ large 
powers, having little more than a formal dependence upon 
the Crown ;' and it is equally clear that the colonists them- 
selves were disposed to give, and did give, the most lib- 
eral construction to their charter powers. Hutchinson says 
of them, "Upon their removal they supposed their relations 
both to civil and ecclesiastical government of England, ex- 

'' All I can say is, that I read them all in my youth, and that I never read 
them without being set on fire." Adams's Works, x. 320, 336. 

' See the discussion of this subject by the late Prof. Joel Parker. Mass. 
and its Early History, 357. 



39 



cept so far as a special reserve was made by their charter, 
was at an end, and that they had right to form such new 
model of both as pleased them." ' On this construction of 
their powers they acted. 

But the home government took an entirely different view 
of their powers, as well as of the conduct of the colonists 
in their exercise of them. As early as 28 April, 1G34, 
a commission for regulating plantations was issued to the 
Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Keeper and others, to 
inquire, besides other matters, "whether any privileges or 
liberties granted to the colonists by their charter were 
hurtful to the king, his crown, or prerogative royal, and if 
so, to cause the same to be revoked."^ 

•Here beijan the Ions; contest which rao'ed with chanoinjr 
fortunes until the treaty of peace in 1783. It was an 
endeavor, on one side, to set up and maintain a free and 
essentially independent government ; and on the other side, 
to overthrow such a government, reduce the colonists to 
monarchical subjection, and regulate their affairs agreeably to 
the imperial policy. To such a contest there could be only 
one result: the colonists were sure to win. Growth, 
development, a boundless continent, remoteness, the inher- 
ited fierce spirit of liberty which neither fire nor steel had 
been able to subdue, and inVincible courage, in time would 
settle the question. It was a question of time, and this 
they seem to have felt all through their history until the final 
consummation of their expectations. In any other view of 
the subject, their conduct was neither consistent nor entirely 
to their credit. 

Chalmers, an accurate though unfriendly historian, has 
sketched the progress of the colony towards independency 

' Hist. Mass. i. 368. 
^ Parker, ut srq). 375. 



40 



for the first fifty years, in the following words : "Massachu- 
setts, in conformity with its accustomed principles, acted, 
during the civil wars, almost altogether as an independent 
state. It formed leagues, not only with the neighboring 
colonies, but with foreign nations, without the consent or 
knowledge of the government of England. It permitted 
no appeals from its courts to the judicatories of the sovereign 
State, without which a dependence cannot be preserved or 
enforced. And it refused to exercise its jurisdiction in the 
name of the Commonwealth of Eno-Jand. It assumed the 
government of that part of New England which is now called 
New Hampshire, and even extended its powers farther east- 
ward, over the province of Maine. And, b}' force of arms, 
it compelled those who had fled from its persecution be^'o^^d 
its boundaries, into the wilderness, to submit to its authority. 
It erected a mint at Boston, impressing the year 1652 on the 
coin as the era of independence . . . thus evincing to all, 
what had been foreseen by the wise, that a people of such 
principles, religious and political, settling so great a dis- 
tance from control, would necessarily form an independent 
State." ' 

Chalmers's statement is not exas^ge rated. It matters little 
with what intent respecting their future political relations 
the colonists eml)arked for Massachusetts Bay. Their eccle- 
siastical independence was an avowed purpose from the 
beginning; and circumstances of which they promptly 
availed themselves favored the formation of an independent 
civil state. Nor should their actual condition at the time 
of the Restoration be overlooked in reading their subsequent 
history down to the Revolution. 

This state of aflairs in the Puritan colony, the refuge of 
the Regicides, could hardly have been other than dis})lcasing 

' Political Annals, 181. 



41 



to Charles II. and his advisers. They determined to change 
it, bat their success Avas partial and temporary. Undoubt- 
edly the loss of their charter was a serious blow to the 
colonists. It was their tirst Ml, but they soon regained 
their feet. The substituted government under the presi- 
dencies of Dudley and Andros was resisted by all prudent 
means, and by violence even, before a knowledge of the 
progress of the Revolution of 1689 had opened a fair 
prospect of success. The charter of 1692 was forced upon 
the colonists in derogation of their acquired constitutional 
rights ; and had they then, or at any time down to the 
Revolution of 1775, quietly submitted, the result would 
have been serious to their liberties. But they did not sub- 
mit, though then, as at the later period, there were those who 
counselled submission ; and during the succeeding century 
there were infractions of their constitutional rights in which, 
from prudential considerations, they silently acquiesced. 

The king, by his Court of Chancery, abrogated the tirst 
charter, and imposed upon the colony one less favoral)le to 
popular rights. Here is the answer of the colonists in their 
Declaration of Rights of the same 3^ear, entitled an act set- 
ting forth general privileges: "No aid, tax, tallage, assess- 
ment, custom, loan, benevolence or imposition whatsoever 
shall be laid, assessed, imposed or levied on any of their 
Majesties' subjects or their estates, on any color or pretence 
whatsoever, but by the act and consent of the governor, 
council and representatives of the people assembled in gen- 
eral court." ' 

^ Acts and Resolves Province 3Iassachusetts Bay, i. 40. Palfrey says, 
" If this had been confirmed, the cause of dispute which brought about 
the independence of the United States would have been taken awaj'. 
But such proved not to be the will of the Privy Council of King William.'* 
Hist. New Eng. iv. 139. This statement is misleading. It is quite true 
that the Council disallowed the whole act, but fortunately they specified 



42 



It is not easy to overestimate the importance of this Decla- 
ration of Colonial Rights. In the very first year of the new 
charter the General Court opened the contest on the grounds 
on which, eighty years later, after some preliminary skirmish- 
ing on less tenable positions, the battle was fought and 
independence Avon. It is also interesting to know that in 
1765, at which time John Adams intervened in pul)lic affairs, 
in his first public address before the governor and council, 
on the question of opening the courts which had been closed 
for lack of stamps, he took the identical position of the 
General Court in 1692 ; and again, in the general congress of 
1774, in the Declaration of Rights of the colonies. 

Nor was resistance confined to mere declarations. Their 
obstruction of the Navigation Laws and Acts of Trade,' 

the grounds of their objections. These objections relate to section 8, 
respecting the allowance of bail, and section 9, which relates to escheat and 
forfeitures. To the sections which declare general rights — the colonial 
Magna Charta — no objections were made, and they consequently retained 
the political significance which inheres in all unchallenged claims of right. 

' In 1698, when the General Court was asked to pass laws enforcing the 
Acts of Trade, even the conservative councillors insisted " that they were 
too much cramped in their liberties already, and they would be great 
fools to abridge, by law of their own, the little that was left them." 
Hildreth, ii. 202. This spirit became hereditary. John Adams has said, 
" These acts never had been executed, and there never had been a time 
when they would have been, or could have been, obeyed." Letter to 
Tudor, March 29, 1818, Novanglus, 245. 

In 1728, when Governoi- Burnett, under royal instructions insisted that 
the General Court should fix by law the governor's salary, instead of 
leaving it to depend upon the temper of that body from year to year, they 
persistently refused, "■ because it is an untrodden path, which neither we 
nor our predecessors have gone in ; . . . because it seems necessary to 
form, maintain and uphold our constitution ; . . . because it is our un- 
doubted right to raise and dispose of moneys for the public service of our 
free accord, without any compulsion; and because, if we should now 
give up this right, we shall open a door to many other inconveniences." 
See Journal of the Gen. Court. 

To these maxims of policy and government, they and their successors 



43 



their assumption of powers not granted by charter, their re- 
fusal to transmit their laws for examination, or allow appeals 
from their judicial decisions, at length produced their legiti- 
mate results in England; and in 1701, as oftentimes later, 
called forth impatient notes of warning from the Board of 
Trade : "The denial of appeals is a humor which prevails so 
much in proprietary and charter plantations, and the inde- 
pendency they thirst after is now so notorious, that it has 
been thought fit those considerations and other objections 
should be laid before the Parliament." ' But these warnings 
and threats were disregarded until the patience of the home 
government was exhausted, and a bill for the repeal of the 
charter was introduced, which failed in the exigencies of more 
pressing concerns. 

Under the first charter all officers were elected directly or 
indirectly b}^ the people ; under the second charter the gov- 
ernor was appointed by the crown, with a negative upon the 
election of the speaker and councillors chosen by the House. 
To this invasion of their old constitution the people lacked 
the power of forcible resistance ; but the popular party, 
under the consummate leadership of Cooke, neutralized 
the governor's power, and held him in thrall, by exercis- 
ino; their constitutional rig-ht of determining his salary. And 
this they continued to do with exasperating persistency and 
disregard of the royal instructions, quite down to the "Revo- 
lution. ^ 

adhered to the end, notwithstanding royal menaces. This was revolution, 
as clearly as any declaration which more immediately preceded the war. 

' Palfrey, iv. 200. 

^ Palfrey has graphically described the chronic contests between the 
roj^al governors and the representatives, as also between the latter and 
the more conservative council, all of which is more fully seen in the jour- 
nal of the House, which, from 1715 to 1730, he does not appear to have 
consulted. '• The House of Representatives began to print its journal just 



44 



This view of the beginning and progress of the contest, 
which ended in the Revolution, might be supported by much 
additional evidence ; but I trust that, even in the fores'oinof 
imperfect sketch, it fairly appears that the Massachusetts 
Puritans came to the Bay that they might be free and inde- 

before the beginning of Belcher's administration, the first publication 
being of the proceedings of May 27, 1730." History, iv. 532, n. This is 
erroneous. The printed journals of the House — and I am informed that 
they exist in no other form — begin with 25th May, 1715, and were con- 
tinued without interruption till the Eevolution. In his concluding chap- 
ter he has deemed it necessary to excuse the conduct of the popular 
branch towards the Crown and its representatives. But this depends. If 
the people of Massachusetts, between 1692 and 1774, their original charter 
having been taken away and another forced upon them, regarded them- 
selves as within the realm, entitled to all the rights and immunities of 
British subjects, and bound to bear their share of the burdens imposed 
by the imperial policy, it is not difficult to understand why, in the eyes 
of the government and people of Great Britain, and even those of the 
neighboring colonies, their conduct was regarcted as captious and rebel- 
lious. Compared with the burdens borne by their fellow-subjects within 
the three kingdoms, their own were light, and their condition prosperous. 
Peoi)le understand the operations of governmental policy. They know 
how unequally tariffs and navigation laws affect different sections, 
classes and interests ; and yet they submit to them for reasons satisfac- 
tory to the majority. Our ancestors neither liked nor submitted to this 
policy ; they obstructed, disobeyed and evaded its operation so far as was 
consistent with their safety. 

Nor could they endure with patience, or treat with decent respect, the 
governors sent to rule over them, and still less the natives raised to that 
high but most uncomfortable position. From one point of view it is 
difficult to see wiiy ; for these representatives of the Crown, in abilitj-, 
learning, character and good dispositions, would compare favorably with 
those chosen by themselves under the Constitution, and were angels of 
light compared with those we have inflicted on our territories. Except 
that they were royal governors, it is not easy to find any insuperable objec- 
tion to Bellomont, Shute, Burnett, Shirley, or even Bernard. 

But, on the other hand, if we find, as I think the colonists found, in 
the repeal of the first charter, and the imposition of a royal government 
upon a people essentially free and independent, the justifying cause of 
irreconcilable hostility, and an invincible determination to throw it off" on 



45 



pendent in their civil and ecclesiastical afl'airs ; that with the 
first monition of danger in the days of Charles the First, 
they determined to maintain their independence at all haz- 
ards ; that the contest, thus begun, continued with varying 
fortunes until the final decision of the questions involved 
was referred to arms ; and, finally, that during these hun- 
dred and fifty years of contention, the colonial constitution 
was growing and developing itself into a free republican 
constitution, as the basis, measure and protection of all 
their rights. 

JOHN ADAMS'S ATTITUDE TO THE REVOLUTION. 

Against this backOTOund of civil and ecclesiastical his- 
tory, in the Massachusetts-Bay colony, John Adams ap- 
peared on the Revolutionary stage. He had studied this 
history carefully, and its significance in relation to coming 
events he fully appreciated. It was revolution, and had 
been revolution from the overthrow of the first charter. 
That he so regarded it, he has expressly told us. From the 
outset, with his first public utterance, he placed himself 
squarely on this basis of the provincial constitution, and 
there he stood, constant, consistent, to the end. This is his 
great distinction. From it he overthrew Hutchinson and 

favorable occasion, then their ninety years of strife, obstruction and 
hostility towards the Crown and its representatives, and final appeal to 
arms, become clear, reasonable, patriotic, and worthy of perpetual remem- 
brance and benediction — and, least of all, demand apology. 

The people out of New England, except the Virginians, had no similar 
experience, and but little knowledge of the real situation of the Massa- 
chusetts Puritans. Hence it is not strange that they, in common with 
those of the British Islands, had come to regard the Yankees Avith preju- 
dice and dislike ; or that witli reluctance they finally placed themselves 
on the Massachusetts grounds, as they did under the lead of John 
Adams. 



46 



Leonard, otherwise unassailable. Any other position was 
full of logical pitfalls ; this was sound, clear, tenable, and 
on it the contest was decided in Massachusetts. 

Had the history of the other colonies been the same as 
that of Massachusetts, with its formative influence upon the 
people and their leaders, the decision of the question would 
have been the same as hers, and the consummation of the 
Revolution would have been comparatively easy. Had Mas- 
sachusetts with New England tinally stood alone, the day of 
her deliverance must have been postponed. But with Vir- 
ginia and Massachusetts in alliance — and, notwithstanding 
a general dissimilarity, there were facts common to their 
history which brought them shoulder to shoulder — the 
Revolution, though difficult, was not impossible. 

It was this difficulty which John Adams encountered and 
overcame at the head of the national party which he, more 
than any other man, gathered, inspired and led. 

For the American Revolution, like all epochal movements 
in the direction of nationality and freedom, depended upon 
the movement of parties. These now demand our notice. 

THE REVOLUTION INEVITABLE. 

When the Revolutionary struggle in Massachusetts, which 
had been suspended during the events which culminated in 
the destruction of the French power in America, broke 
out anew with the Stamp Act of 1765, there seems to have 
been a feeling, common to all the colonies, that growth, 
situation and conflictinjj interests would in time sever the 
political relations which existed between the mother country 
and her colonies ; and this opinion, if such that may be 
called which so vaguely existed in their minds, was the opin- 
ion of Hutchinson and Oliver no less than of James Otis and 



47 



Siimiiel Adams. It is true they disclaimed this, sometimes 
with vehemence. John Adams did so.^ 

He said that at no time before the^Declaration of Indepen- 
dence was he averse to reconciliation, and that he had no 
desire to see the relations with England severed. There 
is abundant similar testimony. The talk of the warmest of 
the patriots was full of loyalty to the king, and of affection 
for the mother country. Nor were they insincere. They 
gloried in the name of Britons. Ties of blood, and attach- 
ment to the old home, were strong, and their pulse quickened 
with memories of Pepperell before the bastions of Louisburg, 
and of Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham. 

But beliefs are not necessarily desires, and we recognize as 
inevitable many things which we deprecate. Could the col- 
onists have been blind to facts and tendences which all the 
world saw ? The testimony on this point is clear and decisive. 
The following are only a few of the observations which have 
been collected by writers on this period of our history : "In 
his notes upon England, which w^ere probably written about 
1750, Montesquieu had dilated upon the restrictive character 
of the English commercial code, and had expressed his belief 
that England would be the first nation abandoned by her 
colonies. A few years later, Argenson, who has left some 
of the most striking political predictions upon record, fore- 
told in his memoirs that the English colonies in America 
would one day rise against their mother country ; that they 
would form themselves into a republic, and that they would 
astonish the world l)y their prosperity. In a discourse deliv- 
ered before the Sorbonne in 1750, Turgot compared the colo- 

' And yet he has told us that long before the war broke out, he and 
Jonathan Sewall, the loyalist, agreed in their sentiments respecting 
pubhc affairs, and both were of the opinion that the British ministry and 
Parliament would force the colonists to appeal to arms. Works, ii. 7S. 



48 



iiies to fruits which only remain on the stem till they have 
reached the period of maturity, and he prophesied that America 
would some day detach herself from the parent tree. Still 
earlier than Turgot's prophecy, Kalm, the Swedish traveller, 
contended that the presence of the French in Canada, by mak- 
ing the English colonists depend for their security on the sup- 
port of the mother country, was the main cause of the sub- 
mission." ' 

But more decisive as to the prevalence of this belief among 
the colonists are some of their own Avords. Dr. Andrew 
Eliot, writing to Hollis, in England, December, 1767, says, 
"We are not ripe for disunion ; but our growth is so great, 
that in a few years. Great Britain will not be able to compel 
our submission;"^ and in 1772, Dr. Charles Chauncy said, 
"that in twenty-five years, there would be more people here 
than in the three kingdoms, the greatest empire on earth." ^ 

But no one, save John Adams, expressed this under-cur- 
rent of thought so clearly as William Livingston, in 1768. 
"Americans, the finger of God points out a mighty empire 
to your sons. . . . The day dawns in which this mighty 
empire is to be laid by the establishment of a regular Amer- 
ican Constitution. . . . Peace or war, famine or plenty, 
poverty or afiiuence, — in a word, no circumstance, whether 
prosperous or adverse, can happen to our parent ; nay, no 
conduct of hers, whether wise or imprudent — no possible 
temper of hers, whether kind or cross-grained — will put a 
stop to this building. There is no contending with omnipo- 
tence ; and the predispositions are so numerous and well 

^ Lecky's Hist. Eighteenth Century, iii. 291. Bancroft has also treated 
this question in Hist. U.S. ; and see Frothingham's Eise of the Republic, 
245. 

2 Mass. Hist. Coll. 420, xxxiv. 

3 Works, ii. 304. 



49 



ad;i})ted to the rise of America, tli:it our success is indubi- 
table." ' 

No one can read the history of the colony in its original 
sources without meeting evidence of the existence of the 
belief that the time would come when the colonies would 
grow into a great and independent empire. Not that they 
wished to set up for themselves at once. On the contrary, 
quite apart from any sentiment of loyalty, it is not improb- 
able that they were too fully sensible of the advantages of 
their position as appendages of the crown, with the privilege 
of drawing upon the imperial resources in warding off the 
attacks of the French, which, as independent colonies, they 
would be obliged to meet with their own men and money. Nor 
did they look forward to any definite time when it would be 
for their advantage to terminate these relations, nor to any 
specific course of action which would hasten that event. 
Nevertheless, their political action tended t-o render that re- 
sult inevitable ; nor was the feeling which inspired this actiop 
allowed to subside ; for, from the earliest days down to the 
war, whenever they showed restiveness under the British 
rule, they were charged with aiming at independence.* 

The Massachusetts colonists may not, as they said, have 
aimed at an independence, yet they steadily, and seemingly 
not unconsciously, pursued a course which would inevitably 
lead to it. 

From the first, it seems to have been inevital)le that the 
political relations between Great Britain and her colonies in 
America should be finally severed ; but not the time nor the 
mode. When and how — whether by the silent influence of 

' The American Whig, quoted with variations by Bouclier, View, xxvio 
and by Frothingham, Rise of the Republic. 244. 

'^ See Evelyn's Diary, May 26, 1671, et seq. Also a letter from Dunimer 
to the House, quoted in Palfrey, iv. 407, u. 



50 



growth, or as the result of violence — were questions in 
abeyance, and subject to chance. The lots were cast, and it 
was war. 

THE EEVOLUTIOX PRECIPITATED BY PARTY ACTION. 

But war Avas not resorted to merely as the solution of dif- 
ficulties which arose from the groAvth and development of the 
colonies. They had not reached that stage — in time sure 
to come — when union made subjugation impossible. Un- 
dertaken solely on that ground, the war, as we now see, was 
jjremature. The colonies were not ripe for it. Xor were 
they strong enough for it. Unaided, they would have 
failed, as fail they did until aided. The war was preci- 
pitated by party action in Massachusetts. The opposite 
view, which has. led to infinite misconception of the revolu- 
tionary struggle, finds countenance only in the general and 
apparently spontaneous uprising of the continent in re- 
sistance to the Stamp Act. But that demonstration was 
utterly deceptive, as afterwards appeared, so far as it seemed 
to indicate any settled conviction and determination. It was a 
commercial protest, backed by no ulterior purpose of for- 
cible resistance. The repeal of the Act, notwithstanding 
the re-affirmance of the principle in the Declaratory Act, ap- 
parently satisfied the public mind everywhere out of New 
England — perhaps out of Massachusetts. It seems to have 
been so even in Virginia. Jeflerson's statement on this point 
is clear, and it is decisive. In Virginia, between 1769 and 
1773, he says, "Nothing of particular excitement occurring 
for a considerable time, our countrymen seemed to fall into 
a state of insensibility to our situation ; the duty on tea, not 
yet repealed, and the Declaratory Act of a right in the Brit- 
ish Parliament to bind us by their laws in all cases whatso- 
ever, still suspended over us." And John Adams, as late as 



51 



1772, writes, "Still quiet at the southward; and at New 
York, they laugh at us." 

This doubtless correctly represents the apathy everywhere 
prevailing out of Massachusetts. The real state of the case 
seems to have been, if the colonies are regarded as a whole, 
that the opposition to the British acts was based on pecuni- 
ary interests rather than on deeply seated political convic- 
tions ; and when the immediate danger of taxation passed 
away, the popular hostility subsided, as Jefferson says. 
But the situation in Massachusetts was peculiar. In the 
jfirst place, the ecclesiastical question, instead of being one 
of tithes, and of yesterday, as in Virginia, was as old as 
the colony, and laid hold on the deepest and most sacred 
convictions of the people ; and, as we have seen, it was 
a burning question, entirely independent of any question 
of parliamentary taxation, and wholly unaffected by the re- 
peal of the Stamp Act, or the modifications of the other 
revenue measures. And in the next place, as we have also 
seen, there had always existed in Massachusetts, as in no 
other colony, two distinctly arrayed parties divided on 
questions directly leading up to colonial independence. And 
in these circumstances, rather than in any exclusive virtue 
or intelligence of this colony — I speak this with bated breath 
— is to be found the reason why Massachusetts was earliest 
and most persistent in the war to which she furnished nearly 
one third of the troops brought into the field, although her 
territory, before th^ close of the first year, was freed from 
the foot of the invader. 

The war began in Massachusetts. It was brought on hy 
the action of parties. These parties, the radicals and the con- 
servatives,' were as old as the race, and will survive Avith it. 

* Adams to Jefferson : " You say our divisions began with Federalism 
and anti-Federalism. Alas', thej' began ^vith human nature; they have 



5-2 



They came over with Winthrop. At first, these graduates of 
old Carabridofe were sufficiently, though somewhat incon- 
gruously, occupied in framing ordinances respecting yoking 
and ringing of swine, party fences, and the laying out of 
town ways and highways ; but these affairs, with some others 
of more importance, attended to, and inter-state affairs, after 
the subsidence of Laud's demonstrations, being in abeyance, 
they divided on theological polemics, and thus preserved the 
civilization which was imperilled in a frozen, savage wilder- 
ness. But the arrival of Charles's commissioners in 1664 
made hot work for both parties ; and the historian of New 
England has recorded, !'that before the close of the first 
century, political parties had arrayed themselves not only 
upon local questions, but also upon questions of the relation 
of the Colonies to the Empire.'' 

With the inauguration of the new government in 1692, 
party strife was renewed and continued, with intervals of 
repose, through the entire provincial period. Party ques- 
tions were somewhat in abeyance through the French Avars 
to the treaty of peace in 1763, but became grave during the 
period of commercial torpidity which ensued, and rancorous 
upon the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765. Nor are we 
permitted to believe that the magnitude of the interests in- 
volved, or the serious consequences likely to flow from 
erroneous action, preserved the discussion from intemper- 
ance, or that conclusions were reached with sole reference 
to the public weal. Contemporaneous newspapers and 
pamphlets, and the published proceedings of the people in 

existed in America from its flist plantation. ... A Court and Country 
party have always contended. Whig and Tory disputed very sharply 
before t^ie Revolution, and in every step during the Revolution. Every 
measure of Congress, from 1774 to 1787, inclusively, was disputed with 
acrimony, and decided by as small majorities as any question is decided 
in these days " [1812], Works, x. 23. 



53 



town meeting assembled, and of their representatives in the 
General Court, contain ample evidence that the party heats, 
personal interests and mob violence, to which many of those 
now living were witnesses in the late civil war, had their 
prototypes in the Revolutionary era. 

At both epochs and in both parties were found radicals and 
conservatives, statesmen and politicians, patriots and self- 
seekers, intelligent adherents and blind party devotees. At 
both epochs and in 1)oth parties, in the name of liberty and 
under the guise of patriotism, against persons whose only 
offence was a silent adherence to their own convictions, were 
committed acts of violence, instigated in the phrensy of 
party by those whose names and charactel* should constitute 
denial, and recorded without disapprobation by historical 
partisans. 

In the Revolution, parties were outlined by the general 
principles of their respective adherents, but were by no means 
homogeneous. There were those in the governmental or Tory 
party, as it then began to be called, who doubted neither the 
omnipotence of Parliament over the colonies, nor the wisdom 
of its exercise in levying a tax ; while others were satisfied 
with the afiirmation of the right. And in the patriotic party 
many deprecated a resort to forcible resistance who strenu- 
ously denied the British pretensions. Of these, Franklin and 
Dickinson were the most eminent; and as late as 1776, their 
opinions were the opinions of the majority out of New Eng- 
land. ' 

Adams writes to Plumer, " You inquire whether every mem- 
ber of Congress did, on the 4th of July, 1776, in fact, cor- 
dially approve of the Declaration of Independence. I then 
believed, and have not since altered my opinion, that there 

' See Franklin's Letters in Tudor's Otis, 392, ?t, and Mag. of Amer. Hist. 
Sept. 1883, article Dickinson; also Hlldreth, iii. 45, 57, 77. 



54 



were several who signed with regret, and several others 
with many doubts and much lukewarmness." ' 

With the exception of the clergy, the party affiliations of 
no class could be accurately predicted. Parents and chil- 
dren, brothers and sisters and life-long friends found them- 
selves arrayed in hostile ranks, as religious and political 
convictions, marriage, social relations, interest,^ or even acci- 
dent, dictated. 

The number of the people in each of these parties is not sus- 
ceptible of precise determination, and varied somewhat with 
the changing fortunes of the contest. Many of those who 
finally adhered to the crown were among the most earnest 
denunciators of the Stamp Act. John Adams has recorded 
it as his opinion that "in 1765, the colonies were more 
unanimous than they have been since, either as colonies or 
states." From 1760 to 1766 was the purest period of pat- 
riotism, from 1766 to 1776, was the period of corruption. 
This agrees with the opinion of Jefferson, so far as he refers to 
the same period. Nor is there anything unusual in this phase 
of parties. So long as dissatisfaction was expressed by 
declarations of rights, or even mob violence, patriotism was 
cheap ; but when it became apparent that affiiirs were drift- 
ing to armed resistance, uncertain in its issue, many who had 
been conspicuous as patriots drew back, and finally entrusted 
their fortunes to the government as the stronger party. 

' Works, X. 35. See Frothingham, Eise of the Republic, 514 et seq. 

* " The managers of our public affairs, like those on your side of the 
Atlantic," writes Dr. Eliot to Thomas Hollis, 10 December, 1767, " are 
governed by private views and the spirit of a party. Few have any 
regard to the good of the public. Men are patriots till they get in place 
and then they are ! ! ! anything." Mass. Hist. Coll. xxxiv. 414. 



00 



THE PARTY OF THE LOYALISTS. 



Of the barristers in Boston and its immediate vicinity, 
Thacher died in 1765, Otis became incapacitated in 1771. 
Five were loyalists, and John Adams alone lived through the 
Revolution as the advocate of American independence. 
Twenty-four of the principal barristers and attorneys in the 
colony, and one hundred and twenty-three merchants and 
traders, including a few others, in Boston, signed the address 
to Gov. Hutchinson, 30 May, 1774; and similar addresses 
to Gov. Gage, as late as 14 October, 1775, were signed 
by the same class of people, and in still larger proportion to 
the population, in Salem and !Marhlehead. Plymouth Count}^ 
was the stronghold of the loyalists. On the evacuation of 
Boston, 17 March, 177G, Sir William Howe was accompanied 
by fifteen hundred of these people ; and in September, 1778, 
the General Court specified, in an act forbidding their return, 
the names of more than three hundred citizens in the severa[ 
counties. These numbers include only those who were con- 
spicuous as landed proprietors or in the mercantile and pro- 
fessional classes. The Tories were in possession of the prin- 
cipal offices in the gift either of the crown or the people. 
As the conservative party, and having something to lose,' 

' John Adams gives the uiipressions whicli the wealthy delegates from 
the other colonies to the Congress of 1774 had received in respect to those 
of Massachusetts. It had been represented to them that Hancock was 
fortunatel.y sick, and Mr. Bowdoin's relations thought that his large 
estate ought not to he put to hazard. So they sent Mr. Gushing, who was a 
harmless kind of man, but poor and wholly dependent on his popularity 
for his subsistence ; Mr. Samuel Adams, who was a very artful, designing 
man, but desperately poor, and wholly dependent on his popularity with 
the lowest vulgar for his living, and John Adams and Robert Treat 
Paine, who were two young lawyers of no great talents, reputation or 
weight, who had no other means of raising themselves into consequnnce 
than by courting popularity. And they were all suspected of having 



56 



they were sa'tisiied with the existing order of things, and 
in that state of mind found it easy to indulge the sentiment 
of loyalty which inheres in the British subject, in all lands, 
so long as he is allowed to do as he pleases. Not that 
the Tories were fonder of paying taxes than were the pa- 
triots, but they were content when the obnoxious tax was 
repealed, and were disinclined to make an issue on the De- 
claratory Act of the parliamentary right to tax. To these 
political sentiments was united the profoundest conviction 
that the colonists, unaided, could never withstand the power 
of the empire when put forth in its might, and that the hope 
of friendly intervention by the continental powers of Europe 
was a dream sure to be interrupted by a rude awakening. 
As the event showed, this was their fiital mistake. 

Such was the party of the government, or the Loyalists. 
Such was the formidal)le party, intrenched in wealth, oiEce 
iind social influence, which confronted John Adams and his 
associates ; and it is his and their glory to have overthrown 
it. 

THE PATEIOTIC PARTY. 

The patriotic party is less easily described, since it con- 
tained many heterogeneous elements. As a whole, it Avas the 
party of the opposition, such as is always found under all 
forms of government. In Massachusetts, its formation on 
well-defined issues antedates by more than a hundred years 
the resistance to the Stamp Act, and was coeval with 
the inauguration by Charles II. of those measures designed 
to reduce the colonies to subjection. The real purpose of 
this part}-, though seldom avow^ed, was, from the first, sub- 
independence in view. Works, ii. 512. This, of course, is Jcbn Adams's 
statement, and it contains so much of truth and sig-nificanec as to enhance 
our estimate of his candor. 



0< 



stantial independence of the Crown of England. At no time 
was it troubled with scruples. It hoped immunity from the 
chastisement threatened by the king in his embroilment in 
foreign wars.' It resisted the abrogation of the old charter ; 
it imprisoned Andros and Dudley ; and when resistance 
proved unavailing, it sought to save the liberties of the 
people by neutralizing the anti-democratic elements in the 
new charter of 1692. The struggle thus begun never 
changed its character, and, as we have alread}' seen, never 
ceased until the peace of 1783. Two things must never 
be lost sight of. First, that this resistance was the resist- 
ance of a party. From the first stage of the contest to the 
last, there was a Tory party which counselled submission ; 
and this party was proportionally more numerous in its early 
than in its later stage. Secondly, that, from first to last, the 
action of the patriotic party was resistance and obstruction. 
It was not the attitude of slaves seeking their freedom, but 
of freemen resisting sul)jugation. The difterence is immense, 
and on its perception depends a knowledge of the real char- 
acter of the American Revolution, which was the final victory 
in a hundred years of party strife, with unbroken continuity 
of unvaried purpose, — the maintenance of independence 
rather than its acquirement, — originating in a province, but 
at length, and mainly through the influence of John Adams, 
enkindling the heart of a continent. 

Besides reasons of state which embittered the colonists 
were some of a personal nature, aftecting those especially 
who suffered under the usurpation of Andros, or were dis- 

' " They say,'' writes a commissioner in 1665, '"they can easily spin 
out seven years by Avriting, and before that time a change may come ; 
nay, some have dared to say, wlio knows what tlie event of tliis Dutch 
war maybe?" Calendar of State Papers, quoted by Prof . Seeley, Ex- 
pansion of England, 68, n. 



58 



placed by Dudley. This personal element was never absent 
from the contest in any of its stages, and finally became one 
of the most potent forces in arraying the Massachusetts 
colonists in armed hostility to British authority. 

The lull of political excitement during the French war 
was only temporary. With the restoration of peace the 
people, no longer distressed by the anxieties occasioned by 
war and irritated by the operations of the Anglican hierarchy, 
were ready to give ear to the whisperings concerning the 
ministerial purpose to raise a revenue in America. The 
passage of the Stamp Act in 1765 left no doubt on that 
subject. This was the occasion for the re-opening of old 
party questions, and party strife ensued, which continued with 
scarcely any mitigation until the war. 

But this was true chiefly of Massachusetts. In the colonies 
to the soutliward the repeal of the Act was followed by the 
general apathy which so much alarmed and disgusted 
Jefferson. The facts verified the conjecture of Franklin. 
In his examination before the Commons in 1766, he was 
asked if the Americans would be satisfied with the repeal of 
the Stamp Act, notwithstanding the resolutions of Parliament 
as to the right ; and his answer was, "I think the resolutions 
of Right will give them very little concern if they are never 
attempted to be carried into practice." 

Additional reasons for the apparent change in public senti- 
ment may be conjectured. At first it seems not to have 
been generally understood that all sums raised in America 
by taxation were to be expended there in the defence and 
government of the country. To this there doubtless were good 
practical and constitutional objections ; but these would not 
be likely to strike the common mind with the same force as 
a project to replenish the British exchequer from the pockets 
of the colonists. Nor was it unlikely that the acts of violence 



59 



which everywhere accompanied the popular expression of 
disapprobation of the measure, should, on second thought, 
cause some apprehension in the minds of those friendly to 
law and order. Property also became alarmed. 

But whatever may have been the reasons for the popular 
falling off, there can be no question as to the fact ; and if it 
had been true in the same deo:ree in Massachusetts as in the 
other colonies, it is doubtful whether the conflict would have 
occurred when it did. 

In Massachusetts, however, there was to be no peace. 
The Stamp Act was repealed, but the Declaratory Act re- 
mained, and the Bishop of London did not stay his hand. 
The Puritan pulpit rang with unceasing alarm until its voice 
was drowned in the clangor of arms. Not one of the causes 
which had kept the royal governors in contention for sixty 
years was settled or in abeyance. New causes were con- 
stantly arising, — often made ; and it was the evident deter- 
mination of the patriotic party that they should be settled 
only in one way — with substantial independence of British 
authority in all matters of domestic policy. To these causes 
must be added the personal hostility, which had become 
deadly, between Bernard and Hutchinson on one side, and 
James Otis, Jr., and Samuel Adams on the other. 

The last-mentioned causes kept the contest alive in Mas- 
sachusetts, which seemed to be in a state of collapse in other 
colonies, until the arrival of the East India Company's teas 
revived colonial interest in public aflairs. 

SAMUEL ADAMS THE GREAT PARTY LEADER. 

In the early stages of the controversy, international as 
well as local, James Otis, Jr., was the leader; but after a 
while his ligrht be^an to flicker, and in 1771 went out and 
was seen no more. Thacher, less to be pitied than Otis, had 



60 



found an early grave. Joseph Hawley and Samuel Adams 
remained ; but Hawley's residence was remote from the scene 
of immediate conflict, and occasional fits of despondency 
rendered unreliable for sudden exigencies one of the most 
able and interesting, but little-known, patriots of the Revo- 
lution. Samuel Adams remained, and in all local, religious, 
political and personal relations, the Revolution in Massachu- 
setts found in him its greatest leader.' 

If his colony was not quite ripe for armed resistance, nor 
all of them strong enough, unaided, to carry through the 
contest if entered upon ; or if, as was the judgment of 
Hawley,'' and as later events seemed to indicate, there was 
danger, on one hand, that the conflict would be precipi- 
tated without adequate preparation, and on the other, that the 
people would grow weary of the strife, — it was Samuel Adams 
who kept alive the spirit of resistance, and with infallible 
sagacity piloted the bark of liberty through these dangerous 
seas. Apathy might prevail elsewhere, but in Massachusetts 
it was not allowed to prevail. At one time there seemed to 
be danger ; but never was an exigency in human afiairs more 
clearly discerned nor more resolutely met. Never was oppo- 
sition more thoroughly organized, nor led with more consum- 
mate skill. To this work Samuel Adams gave his time with- 
out stint, his whole heart, and his admirable ability. His 

' " Adams, I believe, has the most thorough understanding of liberty 
and her resources in the temper and character of the people though not 
in the law and constitution, as well as the most habitual, radical love of 
it, of any of them, as well as the most correct, geuteel and artful pen. 
He is a man of refined policy, steadfast integrity, exquisite humanity, 
genteel erudition, obliging, engaging manners, real as well as professed 
piety, and a universal good character, unless it should be admitted that 
he is too attentive to the public, and not enough so to himself and his 
family." John Adams in 1765. Works, ii. 1G3. 

^ See a remarkable letter on this point, written from Northampton, 
February 22, 1775, to Thomas Gushing, in Mass. Hist. Coll. xxxiv. 393. 



61 



convictions of the justice of the cause were founded on the 
rock. His faith in its ultimate triumph was as the faith of 
the martyrs. He was the last of the Puritans, with the zeal 
of the first of the Puritans.' He hated kings, but most of 
all, popes and bishops. The crown and the crozier were 
alike detested symbols of tyranny. The king was an offence 
far away ; Hutchinson was an offence near at hand. He 
gathered, united and led the patriotic party of his day. 
Into it he infused his own courage, zeal and constancy. 
He was the unrivalled politician of the Revolution. With- 
out him it would never have occurred when it did, nor as it 
did. In this work Samuel Adams was the foremost and 
greatest man. 

NATIONALIZATION OF THE REVOLUTION. 

But the Revolution needed a statesman. Beginning in a 
colony, it was provincial. It required to be nationalized. 
It began on a party basis of local politics ; it needed a con- 
stitutional basis. It had enlisted the sympathies and re- 
sources of a colony. It needed the sentiment of nationality 
and the resources of a continent. To supply these needs was 
the work of John Adams. 

The country needed — and, as the ill-starred campaigns of 
1776 showed, it was one of its sorest needs — one who could 
enlist the sympathies of continental Europe in behalf of the 
hard-pressed colonists, shield them from hostile intervention, 
and secure for them material assistance. For this work, no 
less by the happy constitution of his mind than by the varied 
experiences of his life, of all men, Franklin was best fitted. 

' Adams to Morse : " K James Otis was Martin Luther, Samuel Adams 
was John Calvin . . . cool, abstemious, polished and refined, though 
more inflexible, uniform and consistent." 



62 



Finally, the Revolution needed a leader for its armies : it 
needed Washington. 

Of these men, all required for the initiation and successful 
issue of the Revolution, each could do his own work su- 
premely well, but neither, that of the others. In complete- 
ness and grandeur of character, Washington stands alone. In 
mass of intellect, Franklin is accounted first, and John Adams 
second ; but if amount and variety, as well as importance 
of service as statesmen, be taken into the account, Franklin 
and Adams might change places. 

Under such circumstances of colonial history, John Adams 
appeared on the theatre of public afiairs. Before we can 
rightly estimate his career we must know in what character 
he appeared. Of course he was not a Tory, nor was he a 
Son- of Liberty, though elected as such. He neither repre- 
sented nor did he ally himself to any merely political party. 
He put himself at the head of that great movement of the 
race in America towards nationality, visible to the discerning, 
as we have seen, everywhere except to those who were in it. 
John Adams himself was only vaguely conscious of it, or of 
his relations to it. In this he was like the monk of Erfurth 
and the son of the brewer of Huntingdon. But no less than 
Luther or Cromwell, he was elected to lead and direct the 
movement of an age. 

At the age of twenty he said, " Soon after the Reformation 
a few people came into this new world for conscience' sake. 
Perhaps this apparently trivial incident may transfer the 
great empire of Europe into America. It looks likely to 
me ; for if we can remove the turbulent Gallics, our peo- 
ple, according to exactest computation, will in another cen- 
tury become more numerous than England itself. The way 
to keep us from setting up for ourselves, is to divide us." 
This was in 1755, four years before Wolfe's victory on the 



G3 



Plains of Abraham, and five years before James Otis argued 
against the Writs of Assistance. 

This divination of nationality in the future empire of 
America was not, as it has been regarded, the work of a 
meditative mind turned politician, but an intuition of that 
historic imagination already spoken of which led him in later 
years to head the movement that realized the prophetic 
vision of his youth. No two characters in our revolution- 
ary period are more strongly contrasted than Benjamin 
Franklin and John Adams. Natives of the same colony, 
and in some respects representative of the spirit of its peo- 
ple, in others they differed as widel}^ from it as they did 
from each other. Franklin's intellect was of the first order, 
under the supreme control of common sense, of which he was 
the incarnation. This determined his attitude to the Revo- 
lution. He was opposed to it so far as its promoters con- 
templated armed resistance to Great Britain. Always averse 
to war, he would have patiently waited until time and 
growth should sever the colonies from the mother country. 
He did not believe the colonies were strong enough to fight 
the king ; but when Samuel Adams forced the hand of the 
minister, and war became inevitable, Franklin threw his great 
influence with the patriotic party. As matter of judgment, he 
was right. The colonists were not strong enough to with- 
stand even the feeble generals of the king. At the time of 
French intervention the game of war had gone against 
them, and the last two years were fought largely with 
French troops and French money. Franklin's judgment 
was controlled by his great reason. He had no imagination. 
This is where he diflered from John Adams. As Adams 
said of himself, " It had always been his destiny to mount 
breaches and lead the forlorn hope." He had faith in it. He 
had seen it all a^es in the victorious van, and his imajiination 



64 



was kindled by the historic review. It was just this sublime 
intuition of nationality which distinguished him among his 
contemporaries ; and this, united with great abilities and high 
courao;e, made him the first statesman of the Revolution. 

The value of this ffift to the cause which John Adams came 
to represent, or to himself personally, can hardly be over- 
estimated. He had said that "by looking into history we 
can settle in our minds a clear and comprehensive view of 
the earth at its creation ; of its various changes and revo- 
lutions ; of the growth of several kingdoms and empires ; 
and that nature and truth, or rather truth and right, are in- 
variably the same in all times and in all places." This in- 
tuition enabled him to discern in race tendencies, situation 
and growth, the inevitable result of the approaching contest ; 
and when the hour for choice came, he cast his fortunes not 
with the governmental party as might have been expected 
from his constitutional and professional conservatism, but 
with those ready to battle for freedom and nationality. And 
this faith in the prophetic movements of events left no 
room for doubt as to the justice of the cause, or of its ulti- 
mate success. And so he never quailed in the face of dan- 
ger, nevei'was disheartened ])y disaster, and every step was 
a step forward. 

Besides the faculty by which John Adams divined the end 
and every intermediate step, from the beginning, in the logi- 
.cal order of events, he possessed another of scarcely less 
value to the cause. By constitution of mind, as well as by 
special education, he was constructive ; and in this order : 
before he tore down, he planned reconstruction. Govern- 
ments were not the results of accident, but growths from 
germs, matiu'ing, as the oak from the acorn, by laws of race, 
situation and the facts of national life. His reconstruction, 
therefore, as we shall see, was in accordance with these laws. 



65 



Fiimiliar as he was with the theories of government from the 
republic of Phito to those of his own times, and not un- 
willing to adopt whatever would incorporate itself into that 
system which his race had found most serviceable, he had 
no faith in systems which lacked the sanction of proved 
utility. His work was new. To disrupt an empire was not 
new. It was not new to overthrow governments. But to 
overturn thirteen royal provinces, and, without intervening 
anarchy, to set up in their stead thirteen independent gov- 
ernments ; to loose t!i3 bands of an empire, and re-form the 
contiguous parts into an united whole with such coherence 
as enabled it to maintain itself against formidable odds, — 
this was something new in history, and to many seemed 
impossible. 

Samuel Adams represented the Puritan element in the 
contest in Massachusetts. To him the Revohition was the 
last in a series of events reaching back throuifh a hundred 
years, to resist the imposition of the Anglican hierarchy on 
the descendants of the Puritans. Civil and religious liberty 
were indissolul)!}' united in his atfections, but his inspiration 
was religion. This fervor, which gave him power among his 
own people, detracted from his influence in those colonies 
in which the people regarded the Massachusetts Puritans as 
bigoted fanatics. 

John Adams was also a believer in religion, I)ut he had 
read Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke ' and Hume. To him, religion 
had its place, — the tirst place in natural order in every 
well-reo;ulated mind. But he was no bioot, and had no in- 
vincible repugnance to any form of religious belief. 

And so, in*civil government, he believed in orderly, con- 

' Adams to Jefferson: " I have read Bolingbroke thi'ough more than 
fifty years ago, and more than five times in my life, and once within five 
years."' 



6Q 



stitutional subordination. But, in his scheme, it was a sub- 
ordination to hiws, not men. He believed in laws. As a 
hiwyer he admitted the supremacy of law ; but as a states- 
inan he recognized the distinction lietween those rules wdiich 
in judicial tribunals determine the rights of persons, and 
those general maxims applical)lc only to legislation. In con- 
struing the British Constitution, or that of his own colony, it 
was not with him a question of original theory, but of pres- 
ent fact. " When iSIassachusettensis says that the king's do- 
minions 7nns'( have an uncontrollable power, I ask whether 
they have such a power or not," is his way of reasoning. 
What, by growth, development and actual operative force, 
have these several constitutions come to be, as matter of 
fact, to-da}'? Parliamentarv supremacy is doubtless a con- 
stitutional maxim in England, and the supremacy of the 
Great and General Court, in all internal affairs, civil as well 
as ecclesiastical, is, and always has been, a constitutional 
maxim in the province of Massachusetts Bay. And in both 
cases the validity of these maxims is to be determined, not 
by the declarations or admissions of past ages, but by the 
potentiality of a present dechT.ration. To the assumed right 
of Parliament to tax the colonies, as a corollary of parlia- 
mentary omnipotence, he oftered no theor}^ of constitutional 
construction, but answered, "Our provincial legislatures are 
the only supreme authorities in our colonies." Colonial con- 
stitutions, like the Bi-itish Constitution, he assumed, were 
flexible, readily adapting themselves to changed circum- 
stances, subject to growth and development, and the sole 
measure of the rights of the people, whenever, as matter 
of fact, they had come to rely upon them as such. Nor did 
he fail to perceive, nor shrink from the conclusion, that, 
when time and circumstances brought on the inevitable con- 
flict, force would be the final arbiter. To the acceptance of 



67 



this doctrine he led the national mind, as represented in the 
Declaration of Rights by the Congress of 1774, and inspired 
it at a later date with the audacity to defy a power greater 
than its own. 

Such seems to have been John Adams's theory of the pro- 
vincial constitutions, though nowhere expressly formulated 
in words, and perhaps not even in his own mind ; but every- 
where evinced by his conduct, not otherwise consistent or 
intelligible. He frequently met his antagonists, such as 
Hutchinson and Leonard, on their own ground, and some- 
times overthrew them by skilful fence ; but his strength and 
his power were in his practical recognition of the American 
constitutions. And if, as has been suggested, he has nowhere 
given us a complete statement of his constitutional views 
during the controversial period, but left them to be inferred, 
as in the Declaration of Rights, he is not peculiar in this 
respect. Great leaders, especially if, like John Adams, 
they are men of action, are seldom the formulators of their 
oAvn principles of conduct, and are not always conscious of 
them. They are men of intuitions; and their chief distinc- 
tion is, that they are the first to feel the movement of the 
age, recognize its significance, and give it beneficent direction. 

Excepting the year 1770, when John Adams was a 
member of the General Court, he had no official relation to 
public affairs. In the vulgar strife between those who had 
place and those who wanted place, he felt no interest. Poor, 
ambitious, conscious of great powers, he doubtless desired 
opportunities for their exercise. He saw positions of power 
and emohiment in his profession engrossed by the old his- 
toric families ;which adhered to the Crown. Into this 
charmed circle he gazed, he tells us, not without envy. But 
he was a man of principle, with a just sense of honor, and 
no demagogue. Poorly adapted for the game of politics, 



68 



and lacking the faculty which moulds the sentiments of 
numbers into some definite form of action, he made a poor 
figure as a politician. By the constitution of his mind, by 
taste and education, he was fitted for statesmanship ; and 
when that career was open to him, he entered upon it with 
such success that he soon became recomiized as the most 
commanding statesman of the country. 

The Revolution encountered difficulties apart from the 
evident determination of the ministry to sustain the parlia- 
mentary authority. As a domestic question, it was to be 
rescued from party squabbles, and placed on such constitu- 
tional grounds as would satisfy the sound judgment of those 
on whom it depended for support, as well as the fervid 
patriotism of those whose obstreperous demonstrations were 
silenced by the first call to less noisy duty. It also required 
to be nationalized ; for unless Massachusetts was to stand 
alone, and standing alone, to fail, it was essential that all 
the colonies, of diverse nationalities, histories and religions, 
and without special good-will to Massachusetts, should never- 
theless unite with her on common ground, make her cause 
their cause, and count the work done only when a free, 
independent empire should rise out of the ruins of thirteen 
royal governments. The cause in Massachusetts did not 
stand exactly on the right basis. It was too local and 
personal. It was too largely a question between the ins and 
the outs to excite interest in the other colonies, and in the 
ecclesiastical contention they had no sympathy with the 
Massachusetts Puritans. 

To one of less abundant resources, or less confidence in 
them ; to one with less faith in the future empire of America, 
grounded on the historical development of nationality and 
constitutional government by the Anglo-Saxon race, the 
magnitude and difficulties would have been appalling. But 



69 



John Adams brought ability, courage and devotion to the 
cause, and he gained it. When he entered Congress in 
1774, he found the representatives of the thirteen colonies 
brought together chiefly by commercial considerations, 
having no principle of cohesion, and no purpose of united 
action, except peaceful resistance to parliamentary taxation.* 
But before he left Congress in 1777, and more through his 
instrumentality than any other, these colonies had become 
independent states, some with constitutions for which he 
constructed the plan, and united states with the germ of a 
constitution Avhich took shape under the Constitution of the 
United States, in which were embraced the essential features 
of the Constitution of Massachusetts, the work of his own 
hands. Such an opportunity has seldom presented itself to 
a statesman in any age or country ; seldom has such oppor- 
tunity been so successfully improved. 

CONSTITUTIONAL QUESTIONS. 

The period between 1765 and 1775 was prolific of party 
pamphlets in which the parliamentary pretensions and 
colonial rights were discussed with zeal, and often with 
great ability. Massachusetts contributed her full share of 
this literature to the common cause, and added a series of 
state papers comprising messages from the royal governors, 
and answers from the two houses, together with resolutions 
from conventions and popular assemblies, probably unsur- 
passed in vohime by similar productions emanating from any 
other colony. Owing to her peculiar situation, and the fre- 

' In the Congress of 1774, " after the first flush of confidence was over, 
suspicions and jealousies began to revive. There were in all the Colonies 
many wealthy and influential men who had joined, indeed, in protesting 
against the usurpations of tlie mother country, hut ^^'ho were greatly 
disinclined to anything like a decided rupture." Hildreth, iii. 45. 



70 



quent occasion she gave for interference in her affairs by the 
king or his representatives, few constitutional questions of 
colonial import failed of exhaustive discussion. John Adams's 
contribution to this revolutionary literature was considerable 
in amount, and the direction he gave to it was followed by 
consequences of importance to the patriotic party in Massa- 
chusetts, and later, to the national party in Congress. 

The Stamp Act, and other colonial measures which 
proceeded from the British ministry, became party questions 
on both sides of the water, and were discussed in Parliament 
with the heat which characterizes party declamation at all 
times. In those days, as well as in later days, and in grave 
histories, these declamatory utterances were regarded and 
cited as statesmanlike determinations of constitutional ques- 
tions. Nothing can be more misleading. They were mainly 
party cries of the opposition, similar to those with which we 
became familiar in the congressional debates which preceded 
the late civil war. Chatham's splendid eloquence gave 
currency to declarations which had no foundation in consti- 
tutional law, and Camden, from whose judicial mind more 
caution might have been expected, conceded, and not long 
after denied, the American position ; nor was either utter- 
ance without suspicion of political or personal motive. 
Their object was not to support the rights of the colonists, 
but to overthrow their opponents. There were those among 
the colonists at the time who held these partisan declara- 
tions at their just estimate. John Adams said, "I know very 
well that the opposition to ministry was the only valid ground 
on which the friendship for America that was professed in 
England rested." Camden, who had asserted with the colo- 
nists that taxation and representation Avere inseparable, 
later, in 1767, declared that his doubts were removed by 
the declaration of Parliament itself, and that its authority 



71 



must be maintained. But this attitude of tlie opposition in 
England, though not generally understood in America, was 
of great advantage to her cause. It encouraged the colo- 
nists in their resistance, and led to a feeble and vacillating 
policy in the ministry, which showed itself in the inefficient 
conduct of the war. (See Quar. Rev. Jan., 1884, p. 7.) 

The questions of constitutional law raised by the parlia- 
mentary revenue measures affecting the colonies, neither at 
the time, nor since, have received a satisfactory solution. 
Regarded as questions of law determinable in courts of jus- 
tice, or of the legislative power under the British Constitu- 
tion, in which aspect a law3^er would at iirst be likely to 
regard them, John Adams might well have hesitated in 
forming an opinion. Otis at the outset took the ground that 
Acts of Parliament were not binding on the colonies ; but 
on fuller consideration of the subject, in his work on the 
"Rights of the Colonies," he conceded the claim of parlia- 
mentary supremacy. This was Chatham's doctrine, coupled 
with a distinction between external and internal taxes : and 
Franklin had incautiously admitted " that an adequate repre- 
sentation in Parliament would probably be acceptable to the 
colonists." John Quincy Adams quotes Jefferson's statement, 
''that in the ground which he took, that the British Parlia- 
ment never had any authority over the colonies, any more 
than the Danes and Saxons of his own age had over the people 
of England, he never could get anyliody to agree with him but 
Mr. Wythe. It was too^absurd."" He then adds, "In truth, 
the question of right as between Parliament and the colonies 
was one of those upon which it is much easier to say who 
was wrong than who was right. The pretension that they 
had the rio'ht to bind the colonies in all cases whatever, 
and that which denied them the right to l)ind in any case 
whatever, were the two extremes equ'illy unfounded; and 



72 



yet it is extremely difficult to draw the line where the 
authority of Parliament commenced and where it closed."' ' 

John Adams drew the line against the authority of Par- 
liament in any case whatever, except by the colonial con- 
sent ; and this position, taken in the earliest stages of the 
controversy, he consistently maintained to the end. And 
this was the onl}^ tenal)le ground. Once admit the suprem- 
acy of the British Constitution in re2:ulatino- the internal 
affairs of the colonies, and there was no ground for consti- 
tutional resistance to any acts affecting them, as distin- 
guished from the people within the three kingdoms. On that 
ground neither Hutchinson nor Leonard was answered." It 
was a question of fact, and chiefly as to time. "When the 
colonial charters were the evidence of corporate existence 
within the realm for extra-territorial purposes, they, like all 
domestic charters, were subject to alteration or repeal ; but 
when, by lapse of time, growth and usage, they had become 
governments proper, regulating their own internal affairs, 
they then became colonial constitutions which excluded all 
other authority. This I understand the position of John Adams 
to have b§en. Burke recognized the effect of usage in deter- 
mining constitutional rights. "Do not burden them with 
taxes ; you were not used to do so from the beginning. Let 
this be your reason for not taxing." Of course the British 

' Life and Works, viii. 282. 

* General political maxims never have fiad, and probably never will 
have, pi'actieal force, either in courts or legislative bodies. To cxuote the 
maxim that taxation and representation were inseparable, as a guide to 
legislation, or as a ground for legal resistance to a law already passed, 
while five sixths of the people of England, whole counties, large towns, 
and many of the Channel Islands, were, or had been, wholly unrepre- 
sented, though fully taxed, was practically as absurd as for a fugitive 
slave to quote the Declaration of Independence or the preamble to the Con- 
stitution in a court of law. or for a legislator, in either House of Congress. 



73 



Parliament were quite at liberty to take an entirely different 
view of the question, as they did, and its jiractical solution 
depended on the relative strength of the parties. 

John Adams was brought face to face with this question, 
and took his position in regard to it, before the Governor 
and Council in 1765, on the petition of the town of Boston 
for re-opening the Courts, which had been closed for the want 
of stamps required by the Act. A few days before he had 
written in his diary, " It is my opinion that by this inactivity 
we discover cowardice, and too much respect for the Act. 
This rest appears to be, by implication at least, an acknow- 
ledgment of the authority of Parliament to tax us. And if 
this authority is once acknowledged and established, the ruin 
of America will be inevitable." This was on the 18th of 
December. On the 20th is the following: "I grounded my 
argument on the invalidity of the Stamp Act, it not being in 
any sense our act, having never consented to it." 

On the validity of this position elohn Adams staked his legal 
reputation, his hopes, his fortunes and the welfare of his 
people. 

It is one of the highest claims of Washington to the 
gratitude of mankind that he carried the country through a 
long war in strict subordination to the. civil authority; and 
it raises our respect for John Adams, that, his position once 
taken on the fundamental law of his colony, he maintained 
it with courage and fidelity, without swerving from principle, 
and without recourse to the arts of a demagogue. He began 
his career as a statesman, and such he remained to the end. 

After the death of Thacher and the retirement of James 
Otis, Jr., John Adams became the trusted adviser of the 
patriot leaders on all legal and constitutional questions. 
They had need of him, for the party which adhered to the 
Crown was led by very able men, who carried with them 



74 



he influence of wealth, social position and official station. 
A cause supported by such men as Hutchinson, Sewall and 
Leonard could be overthrown only by powerful assailants. 
Better than any man of aftairs save Hutchinson, John Adam^ 
understood the histoiy, legislation and constitutional law of 
his colony ; and probably no man of his day, on either side 
of the Atlantic, had more carefully considered the founda- 
tions of government, or the formative process by which con- 
stitutions adapt themselves to the changing circumstances of 
national life. He recognized their present validity only so 
far as they conformed to the laws of national growth ; and 
he saw that they retained their identity only as the oak is 
identical with the acorn from which it sprung. 

In the legal and constitutional controversies which pre- 
ceded hostilities, the dialectical force was by no means 
wholly on the side of the patriotic party. Hutchinson was a 
formidable antagonist, and more than once caused anxiety 
in the camp of the Whigs. And he was surpassed by 
Daniel Leonard, whose weekly papers, published in the winter 
of 1774-5, under the signature of "Massachusettensis," raised 
this anxiety to positive alarm. These celebrated letters, — 
if such can be called celebrated which no one reads : a classic 
lost to literature amid the ruins of the cause which brought it 
forth, — written with evident sincerity of purpose and almost 
pathetic tenderness of feeling, were likely to affect the pop- 
ular mind very powerfully, at a time when the colony 
seemed to be drifting into war. His constitutional argument 
was strong — perhaps unanswerable on the ground on which 
he put it ; and his appeals to the judgment, good sense and 
right feeling of the community required an answer. The 
eyes of the Whigs were turned to John Adams. He had just 
returned from the Congress at Philadelphia, in which, with 
infinite difficulty, he had brought the delegates to the true 



75 



fiofhtino; around of the Revolution. AVith the constitutional 
argument he w^as perfectly familiar. The answers of the 
House of Representatives, in January and March, 1773, to 
Hutchinson's messages, were indebted to him for their legal 
astuteness, which was adopted by Samuel Adams and used 
with the skill which characterizes his acknowledged com- 
positions. I refer to these controversial papers only for 
the purpose of showing the attitude of John Adams to the 
main question. The Tory writers, assuming that the colonists 
were British subjects within the realm, and with rights and 
duties determinable by the construction ordinarily given to 
the British Constitution in practical legislation, had little 
difficulty in making plain that no line could be drawn 
between absolute parliamentary supremacy in all cases what- 
ever, and total independence. This was forcing the contro- 
versy to an issue for which the colonists, as a whole, w^ere 
not ripe, as John Adams had sorrowfully learned in the 
recent Congress at Philadelphia. As a Massachusetts issue 
he could accept it with prompt decision ; but there were 
other parties to be conciliated, and he necessarily wrote with 
a view to the state of feeling in the other colonies, and in 
England as well, where the contest was regarded with 
intense interest. In discussing the question as one arising 
on the construction of the British Constitution, he showed 
both power and learning in attack as well as in defence ; but 
he was in close quarters with an antagonist worthy of his 
steel, and as is usual in such cases, he experienced the vnvy- 
ing fortunes of war. 

But on his own ground — the position taken before the 
governor and council, in 1765, on the petition for opening 
the courts ; and later, in the fourth article of the Declaration 
of Rights l)y the Congress at Philadelphia — he was on firm, 
constitutional ground, and historically correct^ if the general 



76 



course of colonial history, rather than isolated facts, is 
regarded. Some of these positions have been already 
referred to ; but as he is about to pass from the provincial to 
the national stage, and as the replies to " Massachusettensis " 
were the latest and most authentic expression of his views 
on the colonial constitution, I refer to them again. 

On the parliamentary modification of the charter contem- 
poraneous with the Boston Port Bill, he says, "America will 
never allow^ that Parliament has any authority to alter their 
constitution. She is wholly penetrated with a sense of the 
necessity of resisting it at all hazards. And she would resist 
it if the constitution of Massachusetts had been altered as 
much for the better as it is for the worse." The inviolability 
of the colonial constitution, and that constitution as the 
basis and measure of colonial rights, was his doctrine. 

This bold })osition was the true position. No sounder 
doctrine ever emanated from any American constitutionalist ; 
and when John Adams assumed it, defended it, and brought 
his colony to stand upon it and fight the war upon it, he 
rendered her a service of statesmanship such as has never 
been surpassed. It changed the nature of the contest. Acts 
which would have been rebellion to the British Constitution, 
and made all participators in them traitors, were no longer 
such, but justifiable and patriotic defence of their own 
constitutional liberty. 

The Whio^s were no long-er fio-htinof ao;ainst Great Britain, 
but for the protection of their own rights. The difference 
was immense, and so were the consequences. This new feel- 
ing nerved the arm and fired the hearts of many whom the 
idea of treason inspired with something of its old terror. 
Every act of ministerial power designed to coerce the colo- 
nists was usurpation, and the ministerial troops became an 
organized mob' which might be lawfully resisted. 



77 



Important as were the consequences of John Adams's doc- 
trine of the inviolability of colonial constitutions in affording 
a good fighting position, other and even more important 
consequences flowed from it. If the peoj^le of the several 
colonies were living under constitutional governments of 
their own, and not merely royal charters revocable at the 
pleasure of the imperial government, it followed that they 
had a rio:ht to chang^e their constitutions at will and mould 
them to their changed circumstances. This was what John 
Adams incessantly urged in the Congress of 1775, and what 
was as strenuously resisted by a large party not yet ripe for 
independence, which, they claimed, and with truth, such a 
measure would promote more than any other conceivable. 
Finally Adams prevailed; and while the war was going on, 
several of the colonies adopted State governments, on 
models furnished by him, and notably his own State, the 
constitution of which he drafted, and from which was 
adopted the frame of government in the Constitution of the 
United States. Fifty millions of people to-day live under a 
constitution the essential features of which are after his 
model. Thirty-eight states now have constitutions in no 
essential respect differing from that which he drafted. Thus 
widely is his influence felt. How permanently, God only 
knows. But until constitutional o-overnment is overthrown 
on this continent, the work of the Great Constitutionalist 
will endure. 

As an example of his insight and grasp of constitutional 
principles, may be cited his action in respect to the impeach- 
ment of the judges who accepted salaries from the crown, 
instead of the province, in contravention of the provincial 
constitution. Peter Oliver was chief justice. His brother, 
the stamp distributor, had been compelled to renounce his 
office under the Liberty Tree. But the chief justice was 



78 



understood to be of sterner stuff, and probably would have 
yielded his life, sooner than his office, at the dictation of the 
mob. The Whigs — and most of all, the Whig lawyers — 
were in doubt. But John Adams had no doubt. The pro- 
vincial constitution, he claimed, contained the germ of every 
power which had been developed in the British Constitution 
in the centuries of its growth ; and now that the exigency 
had arisen which called forth the hitent resources of the 
provincial constitution, with that promptness, decision and 
sound judgment which always characterized his action when 
there was anything to call forth his powers, he proposed the 
impeachment of the chief justice by the House before the 
Council. After his professional brethren had recovered 
from their astonishment at the audacity of this proposal, and 
come more fully to understand the constitutional basis on 
which it rested, they fell in with the idea, and proceedings 
were inaugurated, which were brought to a summary end by 
the war, and the flight of Oliver to England, on the evacua- 
tion of Boston by the king's troops. 

When John Adams was transferred from a provincial to a 
national stage, as one of the delegates from Massachusetts 
to the Continental Congress, which met at Philadelphia in 
September, 1774, he became associated with a body of very 
able men, among whom he at once assumed a leading posi- 
tion, as he had done in his own colony. He was by con- 
siderable the ablest man in the body, and in his line of con- 
stitutional statesmanship, by far the best equipped. 

But his position was one of great difficulty. It is only 
after a careful study of the proceedings of this Congress, 
and the subsequent history of some of its members, that 
we come at its real character. It was a Peace Congress.' 

" That such was its character is evident from the final resolutions they 
adopted : — 



79 



Some of the colonies had been compromised by their attitude 
in respect to the East India Company's teas ; and the 
extreme measures of the British government in closing the 
port of Boston, and altering the charter of the contumacious 
people of iSIassachusetts, excited the apprehension of other 
colonies as to the ulterior purposes of the ministry. While 
it was the patriotic desire of the Congress to express their 
sympathies and to stand by the people of Boston in the 
hour of their sufferings, it was hoped and expected that 
some conciliatory course would be followed which would 
allow the ministry and the Massachusetts people to extricate 
themselves from their difficulties without recourse to war. 

John Adams had no faith in the efficacy of the petition to 
the king, nor in the addresses to the people of Great Britain 
and the Canadas. Matters had gone so far in New England 
that they would be satisfied with no terms short of the with- 
drawal of the ro3'al troops, the re-opening the port of Boston, 
and the total repeal of all measures designed to reduce them 
to obedience. At the same time, not only the British min- 
istry, but the British people also, were demanding the com- 
plete submission of the Bostonians, or the infliction of con- 
dign punishment. So far as Massachusetts was concerned, 
the war was inevitable. John Adams saw it to be so, and 
prepared himself for it. 

He endeavored to prepare the Congress for it, and not 
without valuable results. The great work efiected by this 
Cono^ress was the brinofing: the colonies on to common ground 
b}^ a declaration of their rights. Opinions were divided. A 

" We have for the present only resolved to pursue the following 
peaceable measures : 1, to enter into a non-importation, non-consump- 
tion and non-exportation agreement or association." 2 and 3, to address 
the people of Great Britain, the inliabitants of Britisli America, and to 
prepare a loyal address to his Majesty. 



80 



compromise ensued, and the famous fourth article was the 
result. It was drawn by John Adams, and carried mainly 
by his influence, and reads as follows : — 

" That the foundation of English liberty, and of all free 
government, is a right in the people to participate in their 
legislative council ; and as the English colonists are not rep- 
resented, and from their local and other circumstances can- 
not be properly represented in the British Parliament, they 
are entitled to a free and exclusive power of legislation in 
their several provincial legislatures, where their rights of rep- 
resentation can alone be preserved, in all cases of taxation 
and internal polity, subject only tf) the negative of their sov- 
ereign, in such manner as has been heretofore used and accus- 
tomed. But from the necessity of the case, and a regard to 
the mutual interest of both countries, we cheerfully consent 
to the operation of such acts of the British Parliament as are 
bona fide restrained to the regulation of our external com- 
merce, for the purpose of secm-ing the commercial advan- 
tages of the whole empire to the mother country ; and the 
commercial benefits of its respective members ; excluding 
every idea of taxation, internal or external, for raising a 
revenue on the subjects in America, without their consent." 

Tliis was not precisely what John Adams wanted, but it 
was much. When this declaration went forth, the cause of 
Massachusetts, in whatever it might eventuate, was the cause 
of the colonies. It was nationalized. This was John 
Adams's greatest feat of statesmanship. On it the success 
of the impending war, and the Declaration of Independence, 
rested.' 

^ It is interesting to learn that John Adams regarded the declaration of 
the Congress, on the subject of pai-liamentary power over the Colonies, 
merely as the reaffirmance of the old colonial doctrine. ''Thus it ap- 
pears," he says in Novanglus, " that the ancient Massachusettensians 



81 



Congress having completed its work adjourned October 26, 
1774. This body has been much commended for its moder- 
ation and ability. Chatham eulogized the remarkable series 
of addresses it sent forth ; but neither Samuel Adams nor 
John Adams, nor some of the Virginians, were satisfied with 
the results of the Congress. As Bancroft says, "Congress 
did not as yet desire independence. Had that been their 
object they would have strained every nerve to increase their 
exports, and fill the country Avith the manufactures and 
munitions which they required." On the contrary they 
agreed upon certain commercial restrictions upon the trade 
of the mother country and those colonies which should side 
with her, hoping thereby to coerce the king's government, 
by the influence of the manufacturing and trading classes at 
home, to desist from that commercial policy which was the 
chief ground of their displeasure. As matter of fact, the 
Revolution had not cast off" its commercial phase. It had, 
however, made one capital declaration of colonial rights. 

The value of this stroke of statesmanship became apparent 
in the next session of Congress in May, 1775. The events 
at Lexington and Concord had precipitated the contest which 
the majority of the people of the colonies wished to avoid. 
But the die was cast, and one of the delegates at least had 
measured the magnitude of the struggle that had begun, the 
necessity of nationalizing it, and of bringing to its support 
the full powers and resources of a continental government. 
This sagacity and statesmanship were evinced by the com- 

;ind Virginians had precisely the same sense of the authority of parlia- 
ment, viz., that it had none at all; and the same sense of the necessity, 
that by the voluntary act of the colonies, their free, cheerful consent, it 
should be allowed the power of regulating trade; and this is precisely 
the idea of the late Congress at Philadelphia, expressed in the fourth 
proposition of their Bill ot Rights." Works, iv. 112. 



82 



pleteness of his plans ; and his practical force, by his final 
success in carrying them into operation in spite of innumer- 
able obstacles thrown in his way. " We ought," wrote John 
Adams to General Warren, July 24, ""to have had in our 
hands, a month ago, the whole legislative, executive and 
judicial of the whole continent, and have completely modelled 
a constitution ; to have raised a naval power, and opened all 
our ports wide." When the intercepted letter which con- 
tained the above extract was published at Philadelphia, it 
" displayed him as drawing the outlines of an independent 
state, the great bugbear in the eyes of members who still 
cling to the hope that the last resort might be avoided." 
These views subjected him to animadversion, and even cold 
treatment, to the extent that he " w\as avoided in the streets 
by many, as if it were a contamination to speak with such 
a traitor." 

We see the magnificence of his plan to create the empire 
which he foresaw in his youth. We see the sagacity of the 
measures by which it was to he accomplished. We also see, 
what those who opposed him were soon to see, the vast re- 
sources, the untiring labors and indomitable courage which 
he brought to the execution of these plans. 

His plan w^as to sever at once every political tie which 
bound the separate colonies to Great Britain in their royal 
governments, and to lay the basis of their independence by 
the ei;ection of state govermiients in their stead ; to nation- 
alize these state governments by confederation, and to give 
this new ijovernment the substance as well as the form of 
nationality by adopting the army before Boston, and putting 
it under national commanders ; by constructing a navy ; by 
issuing bills of credit ; by sending embassadors to foreign 
nations ; and finally, by declaring the thirteen colonies, the 
free, independent United States of America. 



83 



To the accomplishment of this work of building a nation, 
no one of all the great men with whom he was associated ad- 
dressed himself with a clearer comprehension of what it in- 
volved, or more ably or more assiduously devoted himself 
to it, than John Adams. 

This was his great work. Before its substantial comple- 
tion I do not think he could have been spared. I see no 
one who could have filled his place between 1774 and 1777. 
But after that period, the Revolution in successful progress, 
independence declared, and the work of constitutional recon- 
struction well advanced, he might have retired to well- 
merited repose. The Congress thought otherwise ; and John 
Adams, who always heeded the call of his country, embarked 
for Europe charged with diplomatic duties. He was well 
informed in matters of public and international law, but was 
not, I think, specially adapted for a diplomatic career. He 
rendered some excellent service, but none which might not 
have been as well performed by his able associates, unless 
we may still question whether their zeal for the preservation 
of the old colonial rights to the fisheries, and for extending 
the boundaries of the country to their furthest limits, was 
equal to his own. He certainly had always before his eyes 
the vision of his youth — the Empire of America. Not even 
in a later day was Webster's view wider, more national, or 
more patriotic ; nor in the largeness and liberality of his 
commercial policy has he ever been surpassed by any of our 
public men. 

Doubtless there is a tendency to over-estimation when our 
eyes are fixed somewhat exclusively upon a single actor in a 
cause which enlists the abilities of other eminent men. But 
I think we may safely add our own to the according voices 
of those patriots who were personally cognizant of the 
services of John Adams, in assigning to him the pre-em- 



84 



inent place among the statesmen of the Revolution. He did 
not bring to the licvolution so large an understanding as 
Franklin's. But Franklin lacked some things essential to 
the cause which John Adams possessed. He lacked youth. 
At the critical period which was forming an epoch in his- 
tory, he was an old man, with great interests depending on 
the existing order of things, averse to extreme measures, 
especially war, and without special training for constitutional 
questions. Jay, Jeflerson, Wythe, Henry, Lee, Gadsden — 
not to mention others — were able men, and rendered great 
services. But, save Franklin, no man in the colonies was so 
largely endowed as John Adams. His understanding was 
extraordinary. He planned well, and he executed his plans. 
There was no other man of so much weight in action as he. 
There were wise men — some, estimated by conventional 
standards, much wiser than John Adams ; but none whose 
judgments on revolutionary affairs have proved more solid 
or enduring. There were younger men of genius, and older 
men of great experience in aflairs ; but John Adams was just 
at that period of life when genius becomes chastened by ex- 
perience without being overpowered by adversity. 

But whatever may have been the value of his services 
when compared with those of his great compatriots, it is 
sufficient title to lasting honor and the unceasing benedictions 
of his countrymen, that John Adams had a conspicuous 
place among those who builded a great nation, made it free, 
and formed governments for it which seem destined to en- 
dure for ages, and aflect the political condition of no incon- 
siderable part of the human race. 

While living, John Adams had no strong hold on the peo- 
ple, and at one time, as he said, an immense unpopularity, 
like the tower of Siloam, fell upon him ; and now that he is 
dead, even the remembrance of his great services seems to 



85 



be growing indistinct. Ho probably lacked many of those 
qualities which attract popular favor, and those which he 
possessed, such as courage and stedfastness, were exhibited 
on no theatre of public action, but in the secret sessions of 
the Continental Congress. Passionate eloquence on great 
themes touches the heart to tiner issues ; but no syllable of 
those powerful utterances which, as Jeflerson tells us, took 
men oti' their feet, was heard beyond the walls of Independ- 
ence Hall ; and even the glory of the transaction which made 
the old hall immortal rests upon the hand which wrote, not 
u})on that which achieved, the great Declaration. This 
ouji'ht not to be altoo^ether so. It matters little to the stout 
old patriot with what measure of fame he descends to re- 
mote age, for he will never wholly die ; but to us, and to 
those who come after us, it is of more than passing conse- 
quence that we and they withhold no tribute of just praise 
from those unpopular men who deserve the respectful re- 
membrance of their countrymen. 

In the public squares of the city have been erected 
statues of those great men, save John Adams, whose services 
were indispensable to the initiation and successful issue of 
the Revolution — Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin and 
George Washington : but our eyes seek in vain for any 
adequate memorial of him whose life, public and private, 
was without blemish, whose essential character is worthy of 
all admiration, and whose services ought never to be for- 
gotten so long as free, united, constitutional government 
holds its just place in the estimation of the people. 



